VICINAGE

Of all the features constituting a citizen's right to a trial by jury, none is so outdated or less of service than the Sixth Amendment provision guaranteeing "an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime [charged] shall have been committed." This specification of the geographic area from which jurors must be drawn should not be confused, however, with venue, which fixes the location of the trial itself.

The clause providing for a jury of the vicinage or neighborhood enjoys a time-worn heritage. In the thirteenth century jurors were usually witnesses or had personal knowledge of the event at issue. Although jurors eventually lost their character as witnesses, both edward coke and william blackstone discussed the precise number of jurors who must come from the immediate locality. Vicinage became an issue in the colonial debate with England, and the Virginia Assembly, in 1769, asserted the colonists' right to "the inestimable Privilege of being tried by a Jury from the vicinage," a position echoed by the Continental Congress and listed as a grievance against the king in the declaration of independence. The Sixth Amendment, framed shortly after the judiciary act of 1789, probably refers to the judicial districts established by that act.

Nevertheless, a federal defendant today "does not have a right under the Sixth Amendment to have jurors drawn from the entire district" (Zicarelli v. Dietz, 1980), and the Supreme Court has denied that trial juries "must mirror the community and reflect the various distinctive groups in the population" (Taylor v. Louisiana, 1975). State courts have generally been willing to narrow the vicinage requirement to a unit as small as an individual county, although federal courts have asserted that the Sixth Amendment clause applies "only to federal criminal trials, not to state criminal trials" (Zicarelli).

David Gordon
(1986)