Crash The Crony Political Justice System: Jury’s Power Of
Nullification Is The U.S. Republic’s Justice!
johnny
roberts
AFTER years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself
speechless. But some questions a woman I know posed during a phone conversation
one recent evening gave me pause:
“What would happen if we organized thousands, even hundreds
of thousands, of people charged with crimes to refuse to play the game, to
refuse to plea out? What if they all insisted on their Sixth Amendment right to
trial? Couldn’t we bring the whole system to a halt just like that?”
The woman was Susan Burton, who knows a lot about being
processed through the criminal justice system.
Her odyssey began when a Los Angeles police cruiser ran over and killed her
5-year-old son. Consumed with grief and without access to therapy or
antidepressant medications, Susan became addicted to crack cocaine.
She lived in an impoverished black community under siege in the “war on drugs,”
and it was but a matter of time before she was arrested and offered the first
of many plea deals that left her behind bars for a series of drug-related
offenses.
Every time she was released, she found herself trapped in an under-caste,
subject to legal discrimination in employment and housing.
Fifteen years after her first arrest, Susan was finally admitted to a private
drug treatment facility and given a job. After she was clean she dedicated her
life to making sure no other woman would suffer what she had been through.
Susan now runs five safe homes for formerly incarcerated women in Los Angeles.
Her organization, A New Way of Life, supplies a lifeline for women released
from prison. But it does much more: it is also helping to start a movement.
With groups like All of Us or None, it is organizing formerly incarcerated
people and encouraging them to demand restoration of their basic civil and
human rights.
I was stunned by Susan’s question about plea bargains because she — of all
people — knows the risks involved in forcing prosecutors to make cases against
people who have been charged with crimes. Could she be serious about organizing
people, on a large scale, to refuse to plea-bargain when charged with a crime?
“Yes, I’m serious,” she flatly replied.
I launched, predictably, into a lecture about what prosecutors would do to
people if they actually tried to stand up for their rights. The Bill of Rights
guarantees the accused basic safeguards, including the right to be informed of
charges against them, to an impartial, fair and speedy jury trial, to
cross-examine witnesses and to the assistance of counsel.
But in this era of mass incarceration — when our nation’s prison population has
quintupled in a few decades partly as a result of the war on drugs and the “get
tough” movement — these rights are, for the overwhelming majority of people
hauled into courtrooms across America, theoretical.
More than 90 percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury. Most
people charged with crimes forfeit their constitutional rights and plead
guilty.
“The truth is that government officials have deliberately engineered the system
to assure that the jury trial system established by the Constitution is seldom
used,” said Timothy Lynch, director of the criminal justice project at the
libertarian Cato Institute. In other words: the system is rigged.
In the race to incarcerate, politicians champion stiff sentences for nearly all
crimes, including harsh mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes laws; the
result is a dramatic power shift, from judges to prosecutors.
The Supreme Court ruled in 1978 that threatening someone
with life imprisonment for a minor crime in an effort to induce him to forfeit
a jury trial did not violate his Sixth Amendment right to trial.
Thirteen years later, in Harmelin v. Michigan, the court ruled that life
imprisonment for a first-time drug offense did not violate the Eighth
Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
No wonder, then, that most people waive their rights. Take
the case of Erma Faye Stewart, a single African-American mother of two who was
arrested at age 30 in a drug sweep in Hearne, Tex., in 2000.
In jail, with no one to care for her two young children, she began to panic.
Though she maintained her innocence, her court-appointed lawyer told her to
plead guilty, since the prosecutor offered probation. Ms. Stewart spent a month
in jail, and then relented to a plea.
She was sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay
a $1,000 fine. Then her real punishment began: upon her release, Ms. Stewart
was saddled with a felony record; she was destitute, barred from food stamps
and evicted from public housing.
Once they were homeless, Ms. Stewart’s children were taken away and placed in
foster care. In the end, she lost everything even though she took the deal.
On the phone, Susan said she knew exactly what was involved
in asking people who have been charged with crimes to reject plea bargains, and
press for trial.
“Believe me, I know. I’m asking what we can do. Can we crash
the system just by exercising our rights?”
The answer is yes.
The system of mass incarceration
depends almost entirely on the cooperation of those it seeks to control. If
everyone charged with crimes suddenly exercised his constitutional rights,
there would not be enough judges, lawyers or prison cells to deal with the
ensuing tsunami of litigation.
Not everyone would have to join for the revolt to have an
impact; as the legal scholar Angela J.
Davis noted,
“if the number of people exercising their trial rights
suddenly doubled or tripled in some jurisdictions, it would create chaos.”
Such chaos would force mass incarceration to the top of the
agenda for politicians and policy makers, leaving them only two viable options:
sharply scale back the number of criminal cases filed (for drug possession, for
example) or amend the Constitution (or eviscerate it by judicial “emergency”
fiat).
Repetition Of Usurped Government
Powers Rendered Unconstitutional.
Unconstitutional usurpations by one branch of government of
powers entrusted to a coequal branch are not rendered constitutional by
repetition.
The United States Supreme Court held unconstitutional hundreds of laws enacted
by Congress over the course of five decades that included a legislative veto of
executive actions in INS v. Chada, 462 U.S. 919 (1982).
Either action would create a crisis and the system would
crash — it could no longer function as it had before. Mass protest would force
a public conversation that, to date, we have been content to avoid.
In telling Susan that she was right, I found myself uneasy.
“As a mother myself, I don’t think there’s anything I
wouldn’t plead guilty to if a prosecutor told me that accepting a plea was the
only way to get home to my children,”
I said.
“I truly can’t imagine risking life imprisonment, so how can
I urge others to take that risk — even if it would send shock waves through a
fundamentally immoral and unjust system?”
Susan, silent for a while, replied:
“I’m not saying we should do it. I’m saying we ought to know
that it’s an option. People should understand that simply exercising their
rights would shake the foundations of our justice system which works only so
long as we accept its terms.
As you know, another brutal system of racial and social control once prevailed
in this country, and it never would have ended if some people weren’t willing
to risk their lives. It would be nice if reasoned argument would do, but as
we’ve seen that’s just not the case.
So maybe, just maybe, if we truly want to end this system, some of us will have
to risk our lives.”
Michelle Alexander is the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age
of Colorblindness.”
New York Times
Jury Nullification Justice
A society that ignores or downplays Liberty is a culture
that has lost its purpose. In such a regime, the people are relegated to the
whims of the State and every citizen is at risk of criminal prosecution.
Imagine the most evil attorney, like John Milton from The
Devil’s Advocate movie, as a DA.
The irony that the initials for a District Attorney are the same as the title
of the script should not be lost.
Al Pacino’s Speech could be given in any courtroom by a zealot persecutor
as a closing statement.
Charging God for the injustices of the world, by a government lawyer and
equating the accused with such crimes, gives new meaning to John Milton’s
classic Paradise Lost.
The justice system has little to do with dispensing righteous responsibility.
What is the alternative to a kangaroo court of facilitator
judges for lying state prosecutors? Historically, a verdict decided by jury is
the greatest protection that any defendant can rely upon.
The video, A Layman’s
Guide To Jury Nullification provides an instructive analysis how a jury of
ordinary citizens possesses the legitimate authority to judge both the law and
the facts in a case.
The Fully
Informed Jury Association provides tremendous resources, links and
information on the rights and responsibilities of jury duty. The following list
of reports grants permission to copy and distribute each of the documents, if
each document is reproduced without modification.
Before critics reject, the need for essential limits placed
upon judges and checks on the erroneous instructions they routinely provide
that mislead citizens on their constitutional authority, examine closely some
of the pronouncement in legal jurisprudence as compiled by levellers.org from a
cache
search. Four examples clarify the right of Jury Nullification.
Justice BYRON WHITE (Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 US 522, 530
(1975)): “The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary
power — to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge
against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the
professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge.”
THEOPHILUS PARSONS (2 Elliot’s Debates, 94; 2 Bancroft’s History of the
Constitution, p. 267): “If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge
states then that juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a
government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the
citizen’s safeguard of liberty, — For the saddest epitaph which can be carved
in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors
failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time.”
4TH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS (United States v. Moylan, 417F.2d1006, 1969): “If
the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury
to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and
contrary to the evidence…If the jury feels that the law under which the
defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the
actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic or
passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that
decision.”
ALAN SCHEFLIN and JON VAN DYKE (“Jury Nullification: the Contours of a
Controversy,” Law and Contemporary Problems, 43, No.4, 1980): ): “The arguments
for opposing the nullification instruction are, in our view, deficient because
they fail to weigh the political advantages gained by not lying to the jury…What
impact will this deception have on jurors who felt coerced into their verdict
by the judge’s instructions and who learn, after trail, that they could have
voted their consciences and acquitted? Such a juror is less apt to respect the
legal system.”
In the spirit of Jury Rights
Day 2013, another video provides added insight into the excesses of
imperial court arrogance and the way that juries can contravene abuses from the
bench, from state or local government attorneys and Department of Justice
agents. The incomparable champion for Liberty and Justice, Lysander Spooner in An Essay on the Trial
by Jury, could not be more profound as he traces the tradition of the jury
system.
That all these courts were mere courts of conscience, in
which the juries were sole judges, administering justice according to their own
ideas of it, is not only shown by the extracts [*79] already given, but is
explicitly acknowledged in the following one, in which the modern “courts of
conscience” are compared with the ancient hundred and count courts, and the
preference [*80] given to the latter, on the ground that the duties of the
jurors in the one case, and of the commissioners in the other, are the same,
and that the consciences of a jury are a safer and purer [*81] tribunal than
the consciences of individuals specially appointed, and holding permanent
offices.
Since the conscience of the juror is the proper standard for
a valid verdict, what measures can an informed citizenry take to combat
charlatan courts from denying the common law protections?
Such horror for the
privileged class of esquire barristers practicing - The Butchered Law.
So, when activist James Babb, from that previously cited,
Fully Informed Jury Association, places informative billboards at Metro
stations near the courts telling passersby about jury nullification, the
ancient right of jurors to judge both the facts and the law, the legal
establishment shutters in fear that their corrupt gatekeeper system will be
overturned.
“Jury nullification no doubt infuriates prosecutors, judges,
and indeed all the petty tyrants of officialdom. Genuine democracy generally
has this effect.
Our ruling class is pleased to call the farcical, heavily
gamed elections periodically held to confirm them in power “democracy,” but the
power of the jury to disregard the law and do justice as they see it represents
genuine democracy, that is, demokratia, or people power.
Indeed jury nullification represents one of the few
remaining bastions of genuine democracy in our technocratically managed
society.
It must be truly maddening for the legal technocrats to have
their pompously ridiculous nonsense overthrown by a gaggle of mere citizens
lacking, as they often do, fine degrees and prestigious titles.
And so they try and try to quash information about the real
point of juries — deciding upon a just verdict — in order to render them
passive and easily controlled, to turn them from real, functioning juries into
inanimate totems used as props for the kabuki shows that we are assured are
“fair trials.”
Currently in the news is a great lesson. A courageous jury
sends a clear message to a fraudulent prosecution and a politicized court. From
Pro-Gun Sheriff Found Not Guilty, “jury nullifies false
arrest of Nick Finch who supported Second Amendment. After closing arguments by
prosecutors and the defense, the jury took less than 90 minutes to reach its verdict.”
However, before sincere citizens declare victory over black robe magistrates
and tyrannical District Attorneys, the New American raises further concerns in,
“Despite Finch’s acquittal, the question remains why a duly
elected, constitutional sheriff was arrested for the actions he allegedly took.
Why was Sheriff Finch not contacted by the FDLE or the governor and asked to
answer the charges against him in a more disciplinary and less overtly legally
hostile manner?
Will Scott and his successors use the Finch case as
precedent for the assumption of the power of approval over voters’ election of
county sheriffs?
Will every act of every one of those sheriffs in the 67
counties in the Sunshine State be subject to summary dismissal should they do
something that doesn’t sit well with the governor or his wealthy campaign
supporters?”
Government courts have become bastions for State absolution
and dispensers of citizen oppression. The Cato Institute recommends that Jurors Should Know Their Rights.
It is meticulously researched and balanced. The enjoyment of
reading it stems as much from the beauty of Clay Conrad’s writing as from the
comprehensiveness of his analysis and the fascinating and important nature of
his subject.”
As long as judges act as enforcers of equity law in an
admiralty court tribunal, the jury is the last refuge for justice. As for
government prosecutors, DA’s are in service of the devil state. Support the Common Law Grand Jury movement and take back citizen control
of the courts.
SARTRE – November 4, 2013
President
John Adams
JOHN
ADAMS – 1771
“It’s
not only ….(the juror’s) right, but his duty, in that case, to find the verdict
according to his own best understanding, judgement, and conscience, though in
direct opposition to the direction of the court.”
