The Virginia Supreme Court recently made a wise decision to step back from a proposal to make all criminal-trial juries anonymous. The proposal was a misguided case of judicial activism.
Last year the General Assembly passed a law permitting anonymous juries if a judge found good cause for keeping jurors’ identities secret in certain circumstances. The legislature instructed the
Supreme Court to promulgate rules for putting the law into effect.
An advisory commission took the inch and then ran another mile. It proposed making all criminal juries anonymous as a matter of routine. It did so because, it surmised, anonymizing only certain juries
might leave the impression that a particular defendant was especially dangerous. But the suggested remedy to this hypothetical threat seems exessive, and doubly so given that even the original
legislation also addressed a largely hypothetical problem. Jury tampering is exceedingly rare in the commonwealth.
The new proposal reverts to the boundaries of the legislation’s original intent. That’s commendable. Perhaps the high court’s advisers can avoid future controversy by staying within such boundaries to
begin with.
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
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