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The “Jury Trial Tax”: The Penalty for Insisting on a Jury Trial
It is a sad but well-known fact among criminal defense lawyers in many jurisdictions that if you insist on a jury trial and lose, you will get a stiffer penalty than if you lose the same case in front of a judge. That’s right: Same facts. Same verdict. Different sentence. This is a variation of the so-called “trial tax,” which …