Matt Blumenthal And Radical Jury Reform

The state of Connecticut has a new Blumenthal on its block, Stamford State Representative Matt Blumenthal, son of U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal.

Before Dick Blumenthal hopped into the Senate, he was for two decades Connecticut’s crusading Attorney General. Along with his predecessor, former Attorney General Joe Lieberman, who also hopped from the Attorney General's office into the U.S. Senate, Dick Blumenthal changed the nature of the office. Historically, the mission of the office was a narrow one: The attorney General, known in colonial days as The King’s Lawyer, was to represent the executive office and state agencies when called to court. With a little judicial jujitsu, Lieberman and Blumenthal were able to add to the initial mission a new function: the office has now become a prosecutorial consumer protection agency for the people of Connecticut.

Like his father, Matt Blumenthal is a progressive reformer. By definition, a reformer is anyone who changes the forms of things and, for this reason, most reformers are correctly tagged as radicals.

Martin Luther, for instance, is considered a reformer because, largely as a result of his theology, church and state after Luther were radically different than they had been before Luther tacked his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral. The founders of the new American nation radically changed the balance of power that had existed prior to the adoption of the US Constitution. A constitutional republic is a radically different form of government than a monarchy.

Radical reformers, as the etymology of the word -- from the Latin, radix = root – suggests, change the roots of things. Reformers are second cousins to radicals, because they change the forms of things.

Matt Blumenthal has his mind set on reforming juries, and the agent of change is, as usual, a “task force,” this one issuing from a study ordered, the Hartford Courant tells us, “by Superior Court Judge Omar Williams and retired state Supreme Court Chief Justice Chase Rogers with a litany of attorneys representing different disciplines. The group met for six months last year, studying court and jury data to develop about a half-dozen recommendations to increase equity in the system.”

The task force has recommended to the State Judiciary Committee that equity and diversity on juries can be increased by expanding “who qualifies for jury duty to include non-citizens and anyone convicted of a felony who has been released from prison, according to the recommendations. Currently, felons are prohibited from serving on a jury within seven years of their conviction.”

So then, the addition to a jury pool of former felons and non-citizens, Blumenthal the reformer tells us, is supposed to increase equity, a word that has become in the modem period “the last refuge of scoundrels,” Samuel Johnson’s descriptive term indicating the pretended patriotism of the radical reformers of his day.

“A fair trial by a jury of one’s peers,” Williams and Rogers advised the legislative committee tasked with writing a bill incorporating the findings of the equity taskforce, “is at the heart of our system of justice. Aside from taxation and voting, jury service for many of our residents is their only personal connection to our courts, and to our government. It shapes their view of our democracy ... Our democracy is only as fair as our trials, and our juries are only as fair as our selection process.”

Matt Blumenthal offered the following gloss: “Glad we passed this important legislation out of the Judiciary Committee yesterday. It will make many important reforms to prevent discrimination, increase diversity, and ensure everyone receives a jury of their peers. Proud to have served on the Jury Selection Task Force that produced these proposals!”

But Blumenthal has a not yet told us precisely how many former rape felons need be present on a jury to assure equity to a defendant charged with rape.  

One properly looks for equity, equal treatment under the law, within the architecture of a trial, but you can’t get to equity by finagling a jury pool so that felons will receive equal treatment under the law only when other felons are admitted to the pool. Nor is it possible to assure that a non-citizen of the United States will receive equal treatment under the law by stacking a jury with, say, citizens absent without leave from Guatemala.

To suppose that a paroled  felon like Frankie “The Razor” Resto can only receive justice if other felons – his peers? – sit on his jury while he is being tried for brutally murdering a store employee, is to misunderstand the meaning of a “peer,” the meaning of “justice” and the meaning of “meaning.” 

The Blumenthal reforms make sense only if one regards this pretense of equity as a political move to garner support among friends of felons and non-citizens present in Connecticut in contemplation of a run in the future for Attorney General or a vacancy in the U.S. Senate.  Matt’s dad, Senator Blumenthal, is getting on in years, and some suppose his son might make a tolerable replacement.