Williams v. Florida
Williams v. Florida, 399 U.S. 78 (1970), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the Fifth Amendment does not entitle a defendant in a criminal trial to refuse to provide details of his alibi witnesses to the prosecution, and that the Sixth Amendment does not require a jury to have 12 members.Also, in 1967 Florida had reduced the number of jurors in all non-capital cases from 12 to 6, and so Williams had been convicted by a jury of six.The point of a jury trial was to prevent oppression by the government: Providing an accused with the right to be tried by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge.[3]A companion case, Dunn v. Louisiana, was dismissed for lack of jurisdiction in a one-line per curiam opinion noting that Justice Marshall would have reversed for the reasons provided in his dissent in Williams.[4] Eight years later, in Ballew v. Georgia, the Supreme Court held that a jury of 5 was unconstitutional.