Jury trials are vanishing. This is the case in both the criminal and civil fora. On the civil side, the American Board of Trial Advocates, whose members must have a certain level of experience with jury trials, struggles to find younger members, because young lawyers by and large are not trying jury trials. There are scores of litigation partners in large firms who have never tried a civil jury trial. The number of civil jury trials barely is more than 200 per year for the entire state.

In the adjoining state of Massachusetts, in 1925 there were more than 3,000 civil jury trials, while in 2003 there were just 586, even as the population boomed. On the criminal side, in 2012, former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy observed that 97 percent of all criminal convictions in federal courts and 94 percent in state courts were the result of plea bargains and not jury trials. He lamented that the criminal justice system is becoming a system of pleas, not a system of trials.

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