holding that the Minnesota Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant’s right to a 12-person jury in misdemeanor prosecutions and, adopting the Supreme Court’s clear break exception, applying rule prospectively
How later courts described this case
- holding that the Minnesota Constitution guarantees a criminal defendant’s right to a 12-person jury in misdemeanor prosecutions and, adopting the Supreme Court’s clear break exception, applying rule prospectively
- refusing to allow constitution to be amended by statute and declaring statute permitting a six-person jury in misdemeanor cases unconstitutional where supreme court in 1869 interpreted the word "jury" in the Minnesota Constitution as meaning "a body of twelve persons"
- noting the key components of the right to a jury trial are “number, impartiality, and unanimity”
- adopting the retroactivity *496 criteria set forth in Linkletter and Stovall
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
SIMONETT, Justice
(dissenting).
I join in the Chief Justice’s dissent. The framers of our constitution in 1857 may well have assumed that a jury had 12 members. They did not, however, act upon that assumption by inserting the number 12 into the document. We are construing a constitution and, within that context, it appears the framers chose not to spell out the size of the jury, preferring to leave the number to the good judgment of future generations.