Nameless Juries Are on the Rise in Crime Cases according to the New York Times.

Prosecutors and the courts favor the practice, claiming it protects jurors from reprisals and from being hounded by the media.

Defense lawyers and civil libertarians oppose it, arguing it erodes the presumption of innocence and makes juries less accountable.

At first, anonymous juries were used in high profile trials like those of the Branch Davidians, the cops in the Rodney King and Abner Louima cases, Oliver North, John Gotti and other mob cases and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

Now they are being used in more routine cases. Most courts uphold the practice. But as a federal appeals court in Atlanta noted, "An anonymous jury raises the specter that the defendant is a dangerous person from whom jurors must be protected, thereby implicating the defendant's constitutional right to a presumption of innocence."

Fordham Law School Professor Abraham Abramovsky says "The right place to draw the line is that unless you have reasonable grounds to show the court that tampering has happened in the particular case or that the defendant has a rich history of tampering, there should never be an anonymous jury."

The media dislikes the practice because "it makes it harder to question jurors about how and why they arrived at their decisions."