Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case • Hacker News Board

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#171

Post by cyphar » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 7:47 AM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #153

cyphar wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy. To be fair, Switzerland comes very close. The public can pass initiatives or constitutional amendments without government intervention through public votes, and the few Swiss people I know consider this to be the primary political system in Switzerland (not the representative elect…

> Switzerland comes very close We very much don’t. Public proposals have to go through multiple rounds of deliberation, cooling down, revision and supermajority popular approval before becoming law.

I am repeating what I have heard from other Swiss people, so while you may not feel that the electoral system is as good as it should be (which is a completely justified opinion in any country and I am sure that Swiss people are not a monolith on this topic), it would be disingenuous to say that Switzerland is not even remotely close to a direct democracy. I am not aware of any other country that has a formal mechanism for laws to be changed where the government or parliament is not directly controlling the process.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#172

Post by watwut » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 7:50 AM UTC

bpodgursky wrote: post #63

dathinab wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why a judge can bring in a jury from outside of the community. But yes, the US law system is deeply flawed in many many ways, and most of it is intentionally (through also historically).

Yes, most of the flaws in the US law system allow guilty people to go unpunished. This was an intentional choice, to err on the side of assuming innocence rather than guilt.

Are you sure that actual outcome of average case? Or rather just a saying? US imprisons most people I the world.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#173

Post by krageon » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 7:52 AM UTC

daenz wrote: post #6

Is jury nullification the ultimate trump card? From what little I know about it, it seems that if enough people in a community knew about it, they could 100% control what crimes are punished in that community. On face value, that makes a sort of sense intuitively, but obviously it has to be balanced against crimes that are in principle clearly wrong, despite what a local community believes.

> clearly wrong, despite what a local community believes.

If the local community doesn't find them wrong, perhaps it is not as clear as you're claiming.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#174

Post by hoseja » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 7:52 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #118

nominusllc wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it do be like that though.

The justice system is supposed to apply to all.

Well it seemingly didn't apply to the guy who seems to have escaped 20+ convictions by... intimidating witnesses? Frankly bizarre.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#175

Post by cyphar » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 7:53 AM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #142

cyphar wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy. To be fair, Switzerland comes very close. The public can pass initiatives or constitutional amendments without government intervention through public votes, and the few Swiss people I know consider this to be the primary political system in Switzerland (not the representative elect…

> The flip side is that in representative democracies (especially with broken voting systems that are not even remotely representative such as in the US, UK, and most of the world) you are very limited in your choices of leader and thus sentiments which are popular with the public can be completely ignored. There is no mechanism to force a public initiative that has legal weight, so you have to hope that a major part…

> Please don't lump the extremely broken US political system with the slightly less broken British and former colonies (Canada, Australia, NZ, etc.) and even less so with the rest of democratic countries around the world which is usually using representative systems.

I live in Australia. Any system which uses winner-takes-all-electorates is structurally unrepresentative. The party list systems in Germany and New Zealand get closer but have other flaws (enshrining of party politics, no preferential voting) and so on. Even a hypothetical Condorcet system with only one house and no local electorates then has the flipped issue that there is no local accountability. A multi-seat preferential electoral system (which is what I'd advocate for) has a threshold issue where you have to decide at which point a particular percentage of the vote is too low to no longer deserve representation. Any system requires tradeoffs and as we all know from the Arrow Theorem (and the Alabama Paradox) there isn't even such a thing as a perfect voting system, so why would we expect to have a perfect electoral system?

My point was not that these are not acceptable systems (though some are better than others), just that if we're going to start talking about how no-true-scotsman perfect systems, it's not reasonable to ignore that the status quo also has a very similar (and in many cases wider) departure from the theoretical state it should be.

And as a non-American, I really dislike this tendency many non-American people have to say "at least it's not as bad in the States!" -- this just breeds complacency as everyone cares more about what's happening to the political system in a foreign country rather than their own. We should all be working to improve things wherever we are, instead of just pointing and laughing at the US.

Also it's not fair to lump New Zealand with Australia, nor Australia with Canada. They all have completely different electoral systems -- so much so that there's literally no reason to group them in any serious discussion.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#176

Post by MiguelX413 » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 7:56 AM UTC

_8j50 wrote: post #126

MerelyMortal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only quote from him that I know by heart: "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."

Wow! I have been saying for a while now that in the US at least the judicial system had no relationship with justice or reason. The false pretense of impartiality and apolitical decision making leads most to believe otherwise.

Any legalist country is like that.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#177

Post by cyphar » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 8:03 AM UTC

southerntofu wrote: post #161

cyphar wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy. To be fair, Switzerland comes very close. The public can pass initiatives or constitutional amendments without government intervention through public votes, and the few Swiss people I know consider this to be the primary political system in Switzerland (not the representative elect…

> Saying "no system fully implements direct democracy" feels like a no-true-scotsman stance, since by the same token no system fully implements representative democracy either Of course some systems implement forms of direct democracies, although they are not represented in the UN because they are not taking part in the "game of thrones" of international politics. But saying that no Nation State implements direct dem…

Ah okay, you're having a philosophical argument about the concept of a direct democracy and how it technically should be a form of anarchy or possibly anarcho-syndicalism.

While I think that is also a very interesting topic and I'm sure we would agree on many things, I'm not sure it helps to get into the philosophical argument while talking about real-life political systems and the different flavours of representative democracies.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#178

Post by eru » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 8:06 AM UTC

hoseja wrote: post #174

eru wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The justice system is supposed to apply to all.

Well it seemingly didn't apply to the guy who seems to have escaped 20+ convictions by... intimidating witnesses? Frankly bizarre.

Just looking at the 20+ number and without further context, we can't say whether he was falsely accused escaped the convictions because the justice system worked for once, or whether he was correctly accused, and escaped the convictions because the justice system had false negatives.

(Looking at the rest of the Wikipedia entry, I am very sympathetic to the latter point of view.)

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#179

Post by vintermann » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 8:08 AM UTC

MerelyMortal wrote: post #46

shrubble wrote: post #41

Some quotations... for me, the quote from Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is important: 'The jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both the law and the facts.' https://www.jurorsrule.com/quotations-and-comments-on-fully-...

The only quote from him that I know by heart: "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."

A terrible, self serving quote, given that it was spoken by a supreme judge.

It was always a court of men, justice Holmes, not law.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#180

Post by JumpCrisscross » Tue, Aug 09, 2022, 8:14 AM UTC

cyphar wrote: post #171

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Switzerland comes very close We very much don’t. Public proposals have to go through multiple rounds of deliberation, cooling down, revision and supermajority popular approval before becoming law.

I am repeating what I have heard from other Swiss people, so while you may not feel that the electoral system is as good as it should be (which is a completely justified opinion in any country and I am sure that Swiss people are not a monolith on this topic), it would be disingenuous to say that Switzerland is not even remotely close to a direct democracy. I am not aware of any other country that has a formal mechani…

> it would be disingenuous to say that Switzerland is not even remotely close to a direct democracy

I am saying it is as good as it is because it is not direct. The majority can propose an initiative, but the legislature gets to deliberate and draft a counter-proposal, with all of this taking time and encouraging sponsors to withdraw their initiative. In essence, it’s a way to prompt the legislature in a certain direction. Not for the majority to write the law. For an example of how that breaks, see California’s referendum process.