Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
Pre-trial Jury Nullification
Posts
The idea of Jury nullification is so old that the main cases discussing it are old too!
English cases that happened in England? Maybe not.
English cases that dealt with colonial states and their people? Way more applicable.
It essentially boils down to an appeal to tradition.
Never mind there is no reason for it to be around, it has always been around so it must be around.
They just get to call this common law in legal circles as if that makes it not a fallacy.
The Supreme Court cites pre-Revolutionary English law from time to time, especially when searching for the meaning of the language in the constitution. In the past, when American law was less developed, such citations were even more frequent. For a fairly recent example (1931), Chief Justice Hughes in the case Near v. Minnesota cites Blackstone's Commentary on the Laws of England to gain some insight into the meaning of the First Amendment and its relationship to prior restraint (here is the text of that ruling). I am sure that someone who has actually studied the law can provide many more examples.
Not necessarily. You'd have a hard time getting a court to accept a ruling from the early 1700s as valid precedent. For good reason.
Citing a court case from 1931 as recent is somewhat odd considering how much of the legal landscape has changed since then.
You are either deeply confused about how our judicial system works, or you are confusing the debate about what is the case from what ought to be the case. Either way, you are confused.
I'm not arguing whether its legal or not, only whether it should be or not. I thought that this was clear.
So... in your mind it's only relevant to cite something from maybe 1980 and onward? That seems silly.
No, it's perfectly unclear. You keep making statements which are demonstrably false, which only serves to muddy things.
Then why are you entertaining this side tangent no whether old English law is relevant to American law? It is a fact that English law -- particularly as it existed prior to the American Revolution -- is the foundation of American law, and that the principles established in the former are the same as those in the latter, except in the cases where they have been specifically altered by statute or constitutional provision. This is why jury nullification absolutely is the law of the land. This is all, of course, entirely separate from the question of whether it should be.
Anyway, I think the right to jury nullification ought to be preserved for two big reasons:
1) There is no practical way to remove it without profoundly compromising the jury's role in the justice system. Opening a jury's verdict to investigation by a judge essentially destroys the jury's power as the sole finder of fact in a case. This powers the state immensely at the expense of the accused.
2) Jury nullification prevents jurors from having to make unconscionable choices. It is terrible to expect that a juror in a farcical teenage sexting trial should be forced to convict the poor teenager under an unjust application of the law. Saying that the juror should just suck it up and do his duty while putting his faith in the appellate court is monstrous.
Boo Fucking Hoo. The supreme court might not like being without its own branch of the armed forces, but that doesn't matter BECAUSE HANDLING THE MILITARY ISN'T IT'S FUCKING JOB. If you don't like the fact that a person you like is guilty, go cry about it in your journal instead of fucking up the justice system.
Telling the jury that it has the right to do whatever it can get away with is basically telling them that they don't have to apply equally and can let a guilty man off because he seems like a nice guy.
For number one, you just showed why jury activism can't be held as precedent, as any alleged case of it is purely speculation based on nothing from the court documents or judicial opinions that comprise a common law system.
I'm curious how preventing injustice fucks up the justice system.
Juries don't have to apply the law equally. A given jury will rule on exactly one case, based on the idiosyncrasies of that one case. Since a jury only decides on one case, the question of whether they are applying the law "equally" is meaningless -- their application of the law in a single case cannot be unequal with itself.
Telling the jury that it can judge the law as well as the facts of a case is merely informing the jury of the full scope of its powers.
I am not sure what you mean here, and I suspect you might be confused as to what jury nullification means. The verdict of one jury in one case is not binding on the proceedings of any other case. The exercise of a jury's nullification powers is always unique to the case in question.
There is this, too. Laws, especially older laws, are not written to be inputs into a law robot. They are written with the powers of judges and juries in mind.
They sure can. This is a relatively minor outlier in the case. And can be used both in good and bad ways, just like skin color was used in both good and bad ways.
I'd rather keep it than revert to law robot.
I'm saying that for something to be precedented in a common law system, it has to at least appear in court documents. Jury nullification has never been directly recorded in court documents, so it is unprecedented.
Then what, exactly, is the rest of the government for? What the fuck is a law if twelve random retards can say it doesn't count, and where the fuck is the principal of equal justice if twelve inbred Alabamians can just say that federal law doesn't apply to white people?
Now, should we instruct juries that they have the right to vote on whatever metric they please?
The law delineates the grounds by which a prosecutor may bring proceedings against a suspect. That by itself is huge.
We should tell juries the truth, which is that they have the ultimate authority to determine guilt. Nothing more or less.
Those 12 inbred Alabamians could be all that stands between you and going to jail because you walked in front of a white man which may be a local blue collar law. Or maybe because you wore sweat pants on Sunday.
The jury can find you not guilty of that as well, whilst still being technically against the letter of the law. They could also say fuck you you're Asian, go to jail. I'd rather protect the first one at the sake of the second one just because to lose the first one is fucking frightening.
Find all the laws you could be guilty of and get jail time! It can even be a family game!
That was in preliminary proceedings. I'm not sure if that counts for precedent or not, or if jury selection statements can be on the record. It's certainly not as heavily weighted as appeals court decisions overturning convictions overturning guilty verdicts and civil court results based on juries using parameters other than guilt or innocence under the law.
You're going to have to give your definition of "guilt," as I was under the impression that it meant a willful violation of the law.
Guilt in the law is fairly circular. You are guilty if the jury says you are.
I know. :wink:
http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_464bdc0a-0b36-11e0-a594-001cc4c03286.html
The Huffington Post skipped over a lot of information, like the fact that the marijuana bust was a violation of his probation.
The goal of our founding fathers was freedom. The goal of our current politicians is control.
As I mentioned earlier, weed is sort of a hot button topic here at the moment.
I'm not going to voice my opinion on the result, or the jury dropping out or whatever, because the man in question is related to me. But I will say that IMO if the potential jurors had been given all of the facts behind the arrest rather than simply "he was caught with x amount of marijuana", the outcome would have been much different.
Also not recorded in either news article was that the first wave of potential jurors was mostly old people, who were asked if they could sit for a 5+ hour long trial, and they said they could not. Which is when the second wave of jurors was brought in, who said they would not convict for the small amount of marijuana.
I can't guarantee it, but most likely, in this town if you were caught with that small amount of weed, and had no priors, you would have probably been let go, with out even a warning from the police officer. Assuming you weren't being a jackass and smoking up outside a school/church or something. But it is not uncommon to see people smoking up in alleys and outside bars etc.
The goal of our founding fathers was freedom. The goal of our current politicians is control.
[citation needed on that 'recognized' thing]
Trial by jury was recognized, too, yet the Framers put in the Constitution. What's up with that redundancy?
Jury nullification is a side effect of the jury's real authority - to decide the facts and not to be subject to punishment or goverment action because of their decision. That is the real bulwark against tyranny, not the ability to say "We think the guy is guilty because the government wouldn't lie about the evidence" or "We vote to acquit because we don't see anything wrong with a white man showing the darkies who's boss."
Being unable to find jurors isn't really "jury nullification", anyway. It's jurors honestly saying that they would not be able to follow their oath and convict the guy if the law and facts say so.
obsolete signature form
replaced by JPEGs.
So this case changes from "twelve brave sticking it to the man" to "twelve retards fuck everything up." Who would have thought that letting twelve random people overrule the democratic process and judiciary would due that?
I will note here how hilarious it is that the argument behind the "right" to "stick it to the man" boils down to "might makes right."
On this I entirely agree with you. There is nothing that can really be done about it without invading the actual role of the jury.
No, what's monstrous is pretending that there's nothing to be done about such laws other than shrugging and hoping some juror gets a bug up his butt about them. We don't live in the Colonies anymore with the Crown imposing law on an unrepresented populace. Why is there a farcical sexting law in the first place? The King didn't decree it. Why is the DA prosecuting this kid? The DA isn't an agent of the Crown, either. People have the right and responsibility to get rid of laws they don't like.
What they shouldn't do is abuse the power of the jury to nullify democratically-decided, constitutional laws because "I feel like it".
obsolete signature form
replaced by JPEGs.
Sorry, what? If somebody is arrested under a law, nobody is allowed to try to get that law overturned? Nobody is allowed to claim the law is unconstitutional? Nobody is allowed to have the DA's office drop the charges?
obsolete signature form
replaced by JPEGs.
Or appeal or lobby for retroactive repeal or write the governor or follow one of the twenty other types of legal solutions he has to choose from.
Once they're arrested and being tried its too late to have the law overturned. Once they're being tried the DA has already decided to charge them. I'm talking bad laws which aren't necessarily unconstitutional, of which we've discussed multiple ones in this thread even on this page.