We now come to trials. As noted in Chapter 11 and again in the Conclusion, Chapter 19, criminal trials are becoming less and less frequent in American criminal justice, virtually replaced by guilty pleas and other negotiated outcomes. But it is nonetheless critically important to understand their dynamics, because virtually the entire architecture of American criminal procedures is designed on the assumption that a trial—and particularly a jury trial—will take place as the ultimate check on the adversarial procedures in effect, and thus those procedures cannot make sense without understanding the trials around which they were conceived and developed.

There is no provision for trial in absentia, a trial in which the defendant is not physically present and without a specific consent from him. In federal courts, Rule 43 provides that a defendant “must be present … at every trial stage, including jury impanelment and the return of a verdict.” The Rule does provide that a defendant may be “voluntarily absent after the trial has begun.”