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Grievance Audit32

Grievance Audit No. 1: The King Denied Jury Trials. America Plea-Bargained Hers Away.

FREEDOM BEAGLE STAFF · JULY 18, 2026

This is the first entry in The Grievance Audit — a series holding the modern federal record up against the twenty-seven grievances the Declaration of Independence leveled at King George III in 1776. The method is the same every time: quote the grievance, quote what the Founders built to fix it, and lay out today’s record with citations. Terms of art are defined per Black’s Law Dictionary. This is reporting on documents, not legal advice.

The grievance

“For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury” — Declaration of Independence, para. 20 (1776)

That’s the whole charge. The king’s courts — particularly the juryless vice-admiralty courts that tried colonial smuggling cases — could decide a colonist’s fate without ever empaneling his neighbors. The Founders considered this important enough to list among the causes of a war.

What the Founders built

They answered the grievance three separate times, in the founding document itself and twice more in the Bill of Rights:

  • U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3: “The Trial of all Crimes, except in Cases of Impeachment, shall be by Jury…”
  • U.S. Const. amend. VI: in all criminal prosecutions, the accused enjoys the right to “an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”
  • U.S. Const. amend. VII: in suits at common law over twenty dollars, “the right of trial by jury shall be preserved.”

Three provisions, one message: fact-finding by citizens, not by the government’s own officers.

The terms, per Black’s

  • Trial by jury — Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024) defines it as a trial in which the fact-finding function is performed by a body of citizens sworn to render a verdict on the evidence, as distinguished from a bench trial before a judge alone.
  • Plea bargain — per Black’s, a negotiated agreement in which a criminal defendant pleads guilty to a lesser offense or to one of multiple charges in exchange for a concession from the prosecution. The defining feature: no jury ever hears the case.
  • In rem — per Black’s, a proceeding taken directly against property rather than against a person. Keep that one in your pocket; it’s how the government sues your car.
  • Res ipsa loquitur — Black’s Law Dictionary (12th ed. 2024): Latin for “the thing speaks for itself”; a doctrine holding that a conclusion may be drawn from the fact of an occurrence itself, without further explanation.

The record today

The jury trial is nearly extinct in practice. Not our characterization — the Supreme Court’s. In Missouri v. Frye, 566 U.S. 134, 143 (2012), the Court stated the numbers plainly: “Ninety-seven percent of federal convictions and ninety-four percent of state convictions are the result of guilty pleas.” Its companion case put it more bluntly still — American criminal justice “is for the most part a system of pleas, not a system of trials.” Lafler v. Cooper, 566 U.S. 156, 170 (2012). And the decline is measurable across a single generation: the share of federal criminal cases resolved by trial fell from roughly 6% in 2000 to under 3% by 2010 to about 2% today, according to analyses of U.S. Sentencing Commission and federal court data by the Pew Research Center. In 2018, Pew found, just 2% of federal defendants went to trial at all — about 90% pleaded guilty and 8% had their cases dismissed. The Sixth Amendment jury did not lose an argument. It lost its caseload.

Why does nearly everyone plead? The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers documented what it calls the “trial penalty” — the gap between the sentence offered in a plea and the sentence risked at trial. Its 2018 report found federal trial sentences run on average roughly three times longer than plea sentences for the same conduct, and in some cases eight to ten times longer. When invoking a right multiplies your prison exposure several-fold, the right exists on paper and expires at the courthouse door.

Your property gets even less. Under civil asset forfeiture, the government proceeds in rem — it sues the thing. The case captions read like absurdist theater (United States v. $124,700 in U.S. Currency, 458 F.3d 822 (8th Cir. 2006)), and because the property is the defendant, the owner often gets an administrative process, not a jury — and frequently no criminal charge at all. The Institute for Justice’s Policing for Profit report (3d ed. 2020) found that of all forfeitures by U.S. Department of Justice agencies from 2000 to 2019, 84% were civil, not criminal — meaning no conviction was required — and documented at least $68.8 billion forfeited under federal and state programs over that period. Justice Thomas, in a statement respecting denial of certiorari, wrote that forfeiture operations “frequently target the poor and other groups least able to defend their interests.” Leonard v. Texas, 580 U.S. 1178, 1180 (2017) (Thomas, J.). The Court has begun tightening — Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U.S. 146 (2019), held the Excessive Fines Clause (U.S. Const. amend. VIII) applies to the states — but the juryless machinery runs on.

The government also built courts inside itself. For decades, federal agencies charged citizens with violations and tried those charges before their own in-house administrative law judges — prosecutor and courtroom under one roof. In SEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. 109 (2024), the Supreme Court held that when the SEC seeks civil penalties for securities fraud, the Seventh Amendment entitles the defendant to a jury in a real court. One agency, one claim type — but the ruling’s logic put every agency’s internal tribunal on notice.

By the numbers

  • 97% / 94% — share of federal / state convictions resolved by guilty plea, not trial (Supreme Court, Missouri v. Frye (2012))
  • ~2% — federal criminal defendants who went to trial in 2018 (Pew Research Center)
  • 6% → <3% → ~2% — federal trial rate in 2000, 2010, and today (Pew; U.S. Sentencing Commission data)
  • ~3x (up to 8–10x) — how much longer federal trial sentences run vs. pleas for the same conduct (NACDL, The Trial Penalty, 2018)
  • 84% — DOJ forfeitures from 2000–2019 that were civil, requiring no criminal conviction (Institute for Justice)
  • $68.8 billion — total forfeited under federal and state programs, 2000–2019 (Institute for Justice)
  • 2024 — the year the Supreme Court (SEC v. Jarkesy) began forcing agency penalty cases back before real juries

The counterweight

Honesty requires the other side of the ledger. Plea bargaining is voluntary in form, and the Supreme Court upheld its constitutionality in Brady v. United States, 397 U.S. 742 (1970); many defendants genuinely benefit from certainty and reduced charges, and no court has held the system unconstitutional as a whole. Defenders argue the courts would collapse under the volume of full trials — roughly 70,000+ federal criminal cases a year against a judiciary built for a fraction of that at trial. That defense is worth stating precisely, because it concedes the audit’s central fact: the system as built cannot afford the right as written.

The audit

The 1776 grievance was that a distant government decided guilt without juries. The 2026 record is a conviction system where juries decide roughly 3 cases in 100, a forfeiture system that sues property to route around jurors entirely, and agency tribunals that needed a 2024 Supreme Court ruling to start returning cases to real courtrooms. The jury box is still there. The paths around it are just better paved.

Res ipsa loquitur — the thing speaks for itself.

Next in the series: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.”

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