“ Because the charges were misdemeanors, with a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or restitution for the bears, a jury trial was not allowed. In the bench trial, Wallen was found guilty by Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynch, sentenced to three years of probation, and $15,000 in restitution.”
The Judge was wrong. The Constitution is quite clear that on any matter of controversy over $20 the right to a jury is preserved.
L
I looked into this. The plain abandonment of the literal text of the Constitution is pretty amazement. In 1970, the US Supreme Court upheld the notion that any sentence under 6 months is deemed “petty,” and not protected by the 6th amendment!
I would be leery of, but unastonished by, a ruling that said that the courts should consider what $20 would be in modern times, given inflation. But even merely the loss of six months’ wages alone would clearly be many times greater than $20!
The sole dissenter was Warren Burger, about whom I also found some interesting information:
Based on the majorities he joined, I’d always considered Burger an absolutely unhinged, Leftist radical. No matter how contrary to the law a ruling was, Burger tended to join the Left. But many people claim he had a conservative motive for doing so: by joining the majority, he could be responsible for content of the ruling, and thus limit the scope of the ruling to the narrowest possible scope consident with the final outcome of the case being heard.
This explains the content of Roe vs Wade: why would the Supreme Court issue a fairly narrow “right” to abortion, and then immediately expand that right with subsequent cases, such as Doe vs Bolton? The answer would be that Burger successfully kept the scope narrow initially, but subsequent cases were used to defeat this strategy. It also explains why Burger seemed to waffle so much.