A win for juries and American citizens


"Jurors cannot fairly determine the outcome of a case if they believe they will face 'trouble' for a conclusion they reach as jurors."
— Judge Betty Fletcher
Jury nullification is a particular cause of mine.

I firmly believe that if jurors were told that it is their duty not only to judge the accused, but the law under which the accused was charged, we would have a much smaller prison population. I'm willing to bet that most of the "law by regulation" would disappear overnight. It would be almost impossible to regularly imprison people using unpopular laws.

Which was EXACTLY what the Founders intended. Jury nullification is one of the few explicit citizen powers that predates the United States Constitution.

The fact that judges have to rule that jurors don't have this power and that prosecutors disqualify jurors who speak of jury nullification and the Fully Informed Jury Association should tell you something right now. If the law truly was against jury nullification then information about it could be introduced in open court, both for and against, without threatening the rule of law.

But no, judges and prosecutors conspire to hide that centuries old power from the public and most importantly from the juries.

There is a reason why the Constitution guarantees trial by jury, and it has nothing to do the powers of judges and prosecutors and everything to do with protecting your rights. That is why juries are sacrosanct.

Which is why I am glad to see this, even if it is a partial victory.

And now, burning up more of our taxpayers' hard-earned and forcefully-collected wages, the prosecutor will probably not rest, but will go after Ed again. And Ed, like every other poor victim of a government gone berserk, will spend more money and put himself in further financial straits in trying to protect his rights and the rights of us all. Because the jurors weren't told their rights, Ed is paying. And because jurors across the nation are lied to by judges all the time, we all pay. The grounds on which the Rosenthal appeal was won, and the stark implications concerning juror ignorance of their immunity in the jury room, the reality of this ignorance being reinforced by threats of judges and occasionally by outright vicious criminal prosecutions of thwarted prosecutors, should have us all demanding the recall of every judge who fails to tell the entire jury pool of their authority, immunity, rights and powers.

How much simpler it would have been had every juror known, right from the start, that they could not be punished for their verdict, for their deliberations, or for their thinking. How much simpler this case would have been had the jury simply refused to convict anyone who broke - intentionally or not - one of the many meddlesome laws imposed on us by a government become too busy-bodyish and too ambitious with its power grabbing.

How many people would not have been financially ruined, how many people would not have suffered the emotional devastation, how many taxpayer dollars would not have been wasted on frivolous prosecutions by ambitious lawyers, and how many lies would not have been foisted on the innocent jurors by power-damaged judges who hold themselves above God, had the jurors known their authority and rights?

I am not a lawyer or a judge (thank the gods!), but I am historian enough to tell you that judges and prosecutors cannot interfere with juries. Even jury selection violates this law.

There is a reason why prosecuting someone is so hard IF the jury knows it's duty to judge the law as well.

And I will point out that any judge or prosecutor who has told juries that they do not have this power is guilty of treason.

That is not a word I use lightly.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - June 2, 2006 at 03:35 PM  Tag


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