Arizona’s Constitution Requires Jury Trials—Not ‘Administrative Hearings’

The Goldwater Institute filed a brief in the Arizona Court of Appeals today urging the judges to enforce the state Constitution’s guarantee of the right to trial by jury, instead of letting state officials prosecute crimes in “administrative hearings” that are presided over by government bureaucrats. Just months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the federal Constitution doesn’t let agencies get around the jury trial provisions of the Bill of Rights by prosecuting people their own in-house “hearings” instead—and as we argue in our brief, which the appeals court requested that we file, the same logic applies to the Arizona Constitution.

In fact, the Grand Canyon State protects jury trial rights even more than the federal constitution does, thanks to the state’s unusual history. During the nineteenth century, many western states began experimenting with the jury system—by, for instance, allowing juries to convict people of crimes on a less-than-unanimous vote. Even Arizona Territory adopted this rule, and in 1891, when Arizonans made their first attempt at writing a constitution, they included it. But in the years that followed, Americans became more attentive to the importance of the jury trial right, and began to abandon those experiments. By 1910, when Arizonans again tried writing a constitution, they had changed their minds: the constitution they ultimately adopted required unanimous jury verdicts.

It went even further in defense of the jury trial. As we explain in the brief, many states in the nineteenth century used a “commissioner” system in eminent domain cases—a system that resembles today’s “administrative hearing” system in many ways. The commissioner system required that a group of experts appraise a piece of property before taking it through eminent domain, and their appraisal was typically taken as the amount of “just compensation” that the owner was entitled to. But these commissioners were often in the pocket of railroad companies, and landowners believed the traditional jury was a fairer process. As states wrote new constitutions in the nineteenth century, many abolished the commissioner system, preferring juries instead—and, again, by the time Arizonans wrote their constitution in 1910, that preference had become fixed. The Arizona Constitution requires a jury, not a group of commissioners, in eminent domain cases.

In short, Arizona’s constitution-makers knew that there were alternatives to the jury trial, like today’s “administrative hearings”—and rejected those alternatives. There’s no good reason to ignore that choice today and to let the government prosecute people for crimes through jury-less hearings presided over by a career bureaucrat.

You can read our brief here and learn more about the Goldwater Institute’s work defending state constitutions here.

Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute.