It was not until 1977, more than 200 years after the signing of the
Declaration of Independence, that the first fully anonymous jury in the nation’s history was empanelled.[3] The case was United States v. Barnes — a criminal trial where the leader of a large drug trafficking network, Leroy (“Nicky”) Barnes, and 14 co-defendants were tried for conspiracy as well as violating narcotics and firearms laws. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the use of the anonymous jury, finding the step was necessary because the jurors’ fear of retaliation would have hindered the deliberative process.[4]
Despite their overall rarity in American history, “nameless juries have progressed from a judicial fluke to a well-established departure from ordinary procedure, and a measure which some authorities argue seriously should be ordinary procedure.”[5] Today, every federal judicial circuit, excluding the 10th Circuit, has approved of the use of anonymous juries.[6] This past summer, for instance, a federal judge in Brooklyn ordered the empanelment of an anonymous jury in the criminal trial of an al Qaeda terrorist who threatened to kill prosecutors and court staff.[7] More troubling is the practice of trial courts in Los Angeles County of withholding juror names in the majority of criminal cases.[8] Even in situations where courts decide to disclose the identities of jurors to the parties, they may refuse to disclose such information to members of the news media.
