elf incorporated all
the rules of procedural protection having their origin in English legal
history. Accordingly, so long as all persons are made liable to be
proceeded against in the same manner, a state statute dispensing with
unanimity,[866] or providing for a jury of eight instead of twelve, in
noncapital criminal cases[867] is not unconstitutional; nor is one
eliminating employment of a jury when the defendant pleads guilty to no
less than a capital offense;[868] or permitting a defendant generally to
waive trial by jury.[869] In short, jury trials are no longer viewed as
essential to due process, even in criminal cases, and may be abolished
altogether.[870]

Inasmuch as "the purpose of criminal procedure is not to enable the
defendant to select jurors, but to secure an impartial jury," a trial of
a murder charge by a "struck" jury, chosen in conformity with a statute
providing that the court may select from the persons qualified to serve
as jurors 96 names, from which the prosecutor and defendant may each
strike 24, and that the remainder of which shall be put in the jury box,
out of which the trial jury shall be drawn in the usual way, is not
violative of due process. Such a method "is certainly a fair and
reasonable way of securing an impartial jury," which is all that the
defendant constitutionally may demand.[871] Likewise, the right to
challenge being the right to reject, not to select, a juror, a defendant
who is subjected at a single trial to two indictments, each charging
murder, cannot complain when the State limits the number of his
peremptory challenges to ten on each indictment instead of the twenty
customarily allowed at a trial founded upon a single indictment.[872]
Also, a defendant who has been convicted by a special, or "blue ribbon,"
jury cannot validly contend that he was thereby denied due process of
law.[873] In ruling that the defendant had failed to sustain his
contention that such a jury was defective as to its composition, the
Court conceded that "a system of exclusions could be so manipulated as
to call a jury before which defendants would have so little chance of a
decision on the evidence that it would constitute a denial of due
process" and would result in a trial which was a "sham or pretense." A
defendant is deemed entitled, however, to no more than "a neutral jury"
and "has no constitutional right to friends on the jury."[874] In fact,
the due process clause does not prohibit a Sta