TRIAL BY JURY MAKES IT TOO HARD FOR THE STATE TO CONTROL PEOPLE: Trial by Jury, a Hallowed American Right, Is Vanishing. “Legal experts attribute the decline primarily to the advent of the congressional sentencing guidelines and the increased use of mandatory minimum sentences, which transferred power to prosecutors, and discouraged defendants from going to trial, where, if convicted, they might face harsher sentences.”

See also my Ham Sandwich Nation paper on this.