A jury like that is palpably nothing but, a mere tool of oppression in the hands of the government.
Lysander Spooner
The Public Record
Lysander Spooner was an American abolitionist, entrepreneur, lawyer, essayist, natural rights legal theorist, pamphleteer, political philosopher, and writer often associated with the Boston anarchist tradition.
gutenberg.org
A trial by such a jury is really a trial by the government itself and not a trial by the country because it is a trial only by men specially selected by the government for their readiness to enforce its own tyrannical measures.
If that be the true principle of the trial by jury, the trial is utterly worthless as a security to liberty.
This example is sufficient to show that the very pith of the trial by jury, as a safeguard to liberty, consists in the jurors being taken indiscriminately from the whole people, and in their right to hold invalid all laws which they think…
So that the government must keep its laws clearly within the limits of justice, if it would ask a jury to enforce them.
The barons of England, sustained by the common people, having their king in their power, compelled him, as the price of his throne, to pledge himself that he would punish no freeman for a violation of any of his laws, unless with the…
The question here arises, Whether the barons and people intended that those peers (the jury) should be mere puppets in the hands of the king, exercising no opinion of their own as to the intrinsic merits of the accusations they should try…
On the contrary, when they required him to renounce forever the power to punish any freeman, unless by the consent of his peers, they intended those powers should judge of, and try, the whole case on its merits, independently of all…
In this way they took the liberties of each individual and thus the liberties of the whole people entirely out of the hands of the king, and out of the power of his laws, and placed them in the keeping of the people themselves.
The trial by jury, be it observed, was the only real barrier interposed by them against absolute despotism.
Could this trial, then, have been such an entire farce as it necessarily must have been, if the jury had had no power to judge of the justice of the laws the people were required to obey?
If the authority be vested in the government, the governmnt is absolute, and the people have no liberties except such as the government sees fit to indulge them with.