Non-Attorney Justice
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Description
Judicial reform movements during the twentieth century exerted great efforts to reduce or eliminate the role of non-attorney judges in the United States. These judges, for the most part, exercised jurisdiction over only minor civil and criminal matters, but they decided factual and legal questions like any lawyer-judge. Thus the call came for a “professionalization” of the judiciary. As early as the 1930s several states had overhauled their largely non-attorney justice of the peace courts, and in the 1940s several states introduced requirements that lower courts be staffed by judges educated in the law. By the mid-1960s, although non-attorney judges were still permitted in most states, various reforms had been implemented to curtail jurisdiction, implement selection procedures, revise compensation structures, and place these courts under the supervision of central administrative authorities. Indeed, a 1974 California Supreme Court decision, Gordon v. Justice Court, held that a defendant tried before a non-attorney judge for a criminal offense punishable by a jail sentence had been unconstitutionally deprived of his effective right to counsel. The obituary for non-attorney justice in the United States seemed all but officially written. However, in 1976, the Supreme Court of the United States rendered its decision in North v. Russell, upholding the constitutionality of non-attorney judge courts within certain parameters. In North, the defendant had been found guilty of drunken driving by a lay police judge in Lynch, Kentucky, and sentenced to thirty days in jail. Instead of requesting a de novo trial on appeal before an attorney judge under the Kentucky two-tier procedure. North sought habeas corpus to raise constitutional due process and equal protection challenges to his conviction by a non-attorney judge. Affirming the Kentucky court’s denial of relief, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld the constitutionality of Kentucky’s lay judge system. The Supreme Court held that the Kentucky procedure providing for a de novo trial on appeal, regardless of whether defendant pled or was found guilty at the original trial, removed any due process objection. Despite its imprimatur on non-attorney justice in North the Supreme Court seemed implicitly to acknowledge the existence of potential due process objections to the unrestricted use of judges without legal training. Moreover, Justice Stewart, in a strong dissent, argued that trial before a lay judge that results in a prison sentence deprives a defendant of his right to a fair trial with the effective assistance of counsel. Thus, the North result, although officially recognizing the propriety of non-attorney justice systems, refocused attention on various safeguards for those systems, which include de novo review and transfer mechanisms, and improved training programs for non-attorney judges.
Source Publication
The Improvement of the Administration of Justice
Source Editors/Authors
Fannie J. Klein
Publication Date
1981
Edition
6
Recommended Citation
Silberman, Linda J., "Non-Attorney Justice" (1981). Faculty Chapters. 1427.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1427
