Clark Neily
Looking back on a markedly tumultuous year in American politics—and a few months forward to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—we might well dub 2025 “the year of the jury.”
The current administration—like some prior ones, but more conspicuously and aggressively—has used the criminal justice system as a tool of retribution and oppression, with the president directing his attorney general to target specific political opponents and, in some cases, publicly proclaiming their guilt before they have even been charged.
But as we know from the Declaration of Independence and the events that engendered it, this is nothing new. In the years leading up to the Revolution, British authorities increasingly sought to bypass colonial juries they regarded as unreliable—too sympathetic to local defendants and too skeptical of imperial enforcement. Customs cases were diverted to admiralty courts. British officials complained that local juries refused to convict smugglers or enforce unpopular trade laws. From the Crown’s perspective, the problem was loss of control over the process of adjudication and punishment. From the colonists’ perspective, it was the criminal law being weaponized against them without the mediating judgment of their peers.
A short but powerful 2021 essay by Professor Guy Chet titled Was the American Revolution a ‘Rich Man’s War But a Poor Man’s Fight’? underscores how offensive that usurpation was to ordinary colonists, who did not need to be tutored in abstract political theory to understand the danger of losing access to local juries. Working-class Americans grasped, intuitively and correctly, that once criminal prosecutions could be initiated and resolved without meaningful citizen participation, liberty rested on the goodwill of politicians and prosecutors rather than the rule of law.
Thus, among the abuses that moved Americans from protest to revolution, the Declaration singles out the Crown’s repeated efforts to undermine a particular institution:
“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.”
That grievance tends to receive less attention today than others on the list. Yet to the Founders—and to the ordinary colonists whose support made independence possible—trial by jury was not a procedural nicety. It was a structural safeguard against politicized law enforcement and arbitrary punishment. It ensured that the criminal process would not be monopolized by distant officials but would instead depend on the judgment of ordinary citizens drawn from the community. As Professor Chet notes, “While most people in Britain and the colonies were not eligible to vote, all were eligible to face prosecution.”
That insight was baked into the constitutional design that followed independence. The jury was not an ornament. It was a check—alongside federalism, separation of powers, and due process of law—on the tendency of tyrannical governments to use criminal law as a tool of oppression and retribution.
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration, that concern no longer belongs safely to the past. Indeed, if any year in recent memory deserves to be called the year of the jury, it may be 2025.
How We Let Juries Wither
For much of modern American history, we have behaved as if that insight no longer mattered.
Criminal jury trials have not been abolished. They have been functionally sidelined. Today, more than 95 percent of criminal convictions are obtained through guilty pleas rather than constitutionally prescribed jury trials. Today’s criminal justice system has been reorganized around the volume, speed, and certainty of conviction made possible by an often palpably coercive plea-bargaining process that remains persistently indifferent to the myriad pathologies of that system, including the horror of false guilty pleas that send the innocent to prison while the real perpetrators remain free to victimize others.
This transformation was not driven by a single administration or ideology. It was the product of decades of bipartisan choices: ever-expanding criminal codes, escalating penalties, and procedural rules that reward coercive bargaining over public adjudication. The result has been a system in which prosecutors exercise extraordinary leverage, defendants are pressured to surrender their trial rights, and the community’s role in administering criminal justice has steadily eroded.
That erosion has consequences. A system that rarely submits its accusations to citizen judgment becomes prone to overreach. Political incentives, institutional momentum, and prosecutorial tunnel vision all operate more freely when the likelihood of facing a skeptical jury is remote.
Which brings us to 2025.
When Jurors Reappeared
Over the past year, a number of high-profile prosecutions—many of them politically tinged, some of them frankly absurd—ran into an obstacle that modern prosecutors rarely encounter: citizen-jurors who refused to go along.
Consider the case of Bobby Nunez, charged with felony theft of government property for towing an abandoned ICE vehicle. The charge carried the possibility of years in federal prison. A jury acquitted him just before Christmas.
Or Sean Dunn, who found himself facing serious charges for throwing a Subway sandwich at a federal agent. A grand jury declined to indict on felony charges. When prosecutors pressed ahead anyway with a misdemeanor theory, a trial jury acquitted.
Or Sidney Reid, accused of assaulting an FBI agent. Three separate grand juries declined to indict.
Or the grand jury’s refusal to indict New York Attorney General Letitia James on mortgage fraud allegations, despite intense political pressure and public agitation.
The point is not that juries are infallible or that prosecutors always act in bad faith. The point is that when cases like these are exposed to citizen judgment—when the government is forced to explain itself to a group of ordinary people rather than to negotiate behind closed doors—the results can be sobering.
What jurors repeatedly signaled in these cases was not ideological fervor, but restraint. Skepticism. A refusal to ratify what looked like the criminal law being used as a political or symbolic weapon rather than as a tool of justice.
What Jurors Were Actually Doing
It may be tempting to read these outcomes as partisan wins or losses. But that would be a mistake.
What jurors were doing—quietly, episodically, but unmistakably—was performing the function the Founders assigned them. They were standing between the individual and the state as an injustice-preventing institution rather than the herd of ham-sandwich-indicting circus seals the government prefers. They were insisting that before the machinery of punishment could be set in motion, the government would have to persuade a group of ordinary citizens that the case truly warranted it.
This is precisely why the jury has always been inconvenient to authorities. Juries are unpredictable. They are supermajoritarian. They bring community norms into the courtroom. They ask not only whether the government has technically proven its case, but also whether the prosecution makes sense—whether it reflects justice rather than zeal, judgment rather than power.
From an efficiency standpoint, juries are a nuisance. From a liberty-and-limited-government standpoint, they are indispensable.
The Folly of Trading Legitimacy for Speed
For decades, we have justified the decline of jury trials by appealing to necessity. The system, we are told, would grind to a halt if every defendant insisted on a trial. False. We would undoubtedly continue to prosecute alleged murderers, kidnappers, armed robbers, and perpetrators of serious thefts and frauds; but if the price of taking the seller of an illicit drug to a willing buyer were weeks or even months away from one’s job, family, or other higher priorities, we might well see prosecutors reassess both the quantity and quality of the cases they chose to pursue. On the other hand, if prosecutors persisted in overloading the system with marginal cases, the downside would simply be a greater commitment of resources to criminal justice—a modest imposition given the constitutional commands of due process, transparency, and fundamental fairness.
More importantly, the Founders did not prioritize efficiency in criminal adjudication. They prioritized legitimacy. They accepted friction, delay, and even occasional acquittals of the guilty as the price of ensuring that punishment would not be imposed without broad citizen assent.
What we have built instead is a system that resolves cases quickly, quietly, and too often coercively—one that depends on guilty pleas rather than public verdicts, and on prosecutorial discretion rather than community judgment. As we have seen recently, the system’s pathologies become especially visible when it is asked to handle politically charged cases.
In 2025, juries reminded us of a more just alternative.
Looking Toward the 250th Anniversary
The approaching semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence invites reflection, not merely nostalgia. The Declaration’s grievances were not museum pieces even in 1776; they were warnings. Chief among them was the danger of allowing criminal punishment to be imposed without meaningful citizen participation.
For a long time, we have treated that warning as obsolete. We have assumed that professionalism and efficiency could substitute for the judgment of ordinary people. This past year shows otherwise.
When citizen jurors are allowed to do their job—when cases actually reach them—they can still serve as a powerful check on politicized or overzealous prosecution. They can still decline to go along with ill-conceived, improperly motivated, or otherwise unjust prosecutions. And sometimes, that refusal is the most important verdict of all.
If 2025 is remembered as the year of the jury, it will not be because jurors were perfect. It will be because they reminded us of something we had nearly forgotten: that liberty is not preserved by efficient institutions alone, but by the active participation of citizens in the administration of criminal justice dispensed in their names.