Impartial Justice by Kasper Eric T.;

Author:Kasper, Eric T.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739177228
Publisher: Lexington Books

Burger may have been right that notifying defendants of their right to counsel was “the standard procedure,” and it may have been the case that most police court judges recognized their obligation to inform defendants of their right to an appeal, but there is no evidence that Judge Russell did this for North. An uninformed and unrepresented defendant, like North, is left with little recourse in this situation, a reality that the Chief Justice failed to recognize.

Burger next differentiated North’s case from Tumey v. Ohio.1927) and Ward v. Village of Monroeville (1972) (see chapter six for more on these cases). North argued that cases stood for the proposition that non-lawyer judges could not preside over trials. Burger, on the other hand, rightfully saw that those cases involved judges who were potentially biased because of the financial incentives in place to find defendants guilty. For Burger, in Tumey and Ward "the challenge was directed not at the training or education of the judge but at his possible bias due to interest in the outcome of the case, [or because] he was both mayor and judge and received a portion of his compensation directly from the fines.”14 No such potential for judicial bias existed in North.

Chief Justice Burger closed this section of his opinion by discussing that there is nothing about legal training that necessarily makes a legal arbiter impartial: “Our concern in prior cases with judicial functions being performed by nonjudicial officers has also been directed at the need for independent, neutral, and detached judgment, not at legal training.”15 Burger then went on to state that the Court previously approved of the constitutionality of “lay magistrates and other judicial officers empowered to issue warrants,” even though in such situations those officers “must deal with evaluation of such legal concepts as probable cause and the sufficiency of warrant affidavits.”16 Thus, Burger found plenty of evidence that persons without formal legal training and bar admission could make legal decisions impartially, and thus there was no due process violation.

Justice Potter Stewart dissented in North, and he also wrote on the behalf of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Stewart found that a trial before a judge who was not a lawyer violated both the right to counsel and due process. According to Stewart,

[T]he essential presupposition of this basic constitutional right is that the judge conducting the trial will be able to understand what the defendant’s lawyer is talking about. For if the judge himself is ignorant of the law, then he, too, will be incapable of determining whether the charge is good or bad. He, too, will be unfamiliar with the rules of evidence. And a lawyer for the defendant will be able to do little or nothing to prevent an unjust conviction. In a trial before such a judge, the constitutional right to the assistance of counsel thus becomes a hollow mockery.17

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.