221–230 of 449 posts
Does the door open to the other side, which is an all-white jury finding Ruben Carter guilty?
Yes but a judge can overrule it. A judge cannot however overrule a not-guilty verdict and find the defendant guilty.
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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.
It’s the job of the legislature to fix the laws and make them aligned with your idea of justice.
Take asset forfeiture for example, there is no law that permits it explicitly but there are laws about property rights,due process and privacy. By precedent and in ignorance of what common sense tells a reasonable person "this is unfair" they steal property from people without due process.
The legislature can't even stop companies from being treated as persons which any sane person will tell you is unreasonable or illogical.
It is all merely theatrics to veil implementations of hidden agendas and ulterior motives.
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Surely this defeats the whole point of jury nullification? Yo should have said yes and then voted your conscience no?
Is it perjury to lie in this case?
But you're in a very difficult position morally when asked that question (assuming it's for the purpose of removing anyone who will engage in jury nullification). If you actually believe in jury nullification then morally you have to lie right? Otherwise you're allowing someone to override what you consider to be an important civil right. It's no different to someone standing outside a polling booth and refusing entry unless you promised to vote for his candidate: if you actually believe in democracy you need to lie...
To be clear, I am not absolutely convinced by the whole Jury Nullification thing. Obviously it's practically possible but I am not convinced it is a good thing, let alone a civil right or a check on power etc. I am a limey brit and over here we don't "pick" or "disqualify" jurors for better or worse. So aside from knowing people involved in the case, you don't get asked questions like this...
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I mean, if "the vast majority of citizens thinks something is a good thing", shouldn't it be legal in the first place? Because democracy.
> if "the vast majority of citizens thinks something is a good thing", shouldn't it be legal in the first place? Because democracy Sort of. It’s tyranny of the majority [1]. The meaning of democracy has changed over millennia. Classically, democracy encompasses “freedom of assembly, association, property rights, freedom of religion and speech, inclusiveness and equality, citizenship, consent of the governed, voting r…
What you describe was an "age of enlightenment"-style idealised version of democracy that lived for a short time before it was being killed again, bit by bit.
And that direct democracy thing ... it works for the Swiss, and many would argue the problem today is not too much democracy, but too little, and it becoming ever-smaller.
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.
> 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. Only in one direction, I think. Jury nullification still can't render a guilty verdict, when the law says the defendant ain't guilty. (At least in principle.)
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Sit through jury selection and you'll see people vastly overestimate their ability to convince a prosecutor that they truly believe that. When I observed jury selection I saw several people back down from stances that were clearly attempts to get kicked off the jury. It's not like the lawyers ask one question then dismiss you. I did see one guy who claimed he believed "all courts are invalid" hold up to some pretty i…
I can just picture the wrong judge thinking "Give me a reason. Just one reason...and I'll show you who's valid"
The reasons that seemed to get a quick dismissal were people who had been victims of crime in the past, people who had family members who were police officers, lawyers, judges. People who held not uncommon beliefs that would bias them (e.g. "I believe that people of color can't get a fair trial"), but not always if the juror said they could make a decision without that bias clouding their judgement.
The ones that picked extreme beliefs just got more questioning until they either admitted their belief wouldn't cloud their judge or that their belief wasn't so extreme as to bias them.
I mean, the judge and lawyers question people for a living, so they know exactly how to drill down and force an answer out.
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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.
But laws can be unjust. I think the quote is simply accurate.
But judges get to stretch and squeeze laws all the time, all the way from nullification to the most unhinged overreach. And unlike juries, they get to pretend they didn't. And in an SC judge's case, it takes a constitutional crisis to overrule them.
It's personal power on an unbelievable level, yet this guy pretends it's not him? That it's instead some abstract intangible force? Seriously, what a terrible person.
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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 representativ…
> you're having a philosophical argument I don't think i am, sorry if it sounds like bikeshedding. I'm interested in the practical question of who holds political power, and who holds the "legitimate violence" to enforce this political power. If me and my neighbors can't "legally" define our own sets of rules and regulations (which we can't in France), i just can't call that a democracy. Time and time again i've witn…
If you and your neighbours want to not be subject to the French government, you can always go somewhere else. The fact there’s probably nowhere better for you to go is hardly France’s problem.
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That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy. In practice what we generally have is representative democracy, where we delegate the power to make laws, and make and implement policy to representatives. Those representatives have personal moral responsibility for the laws and decisions they make and are sovereign individuals in t…
> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s the argument advocates of direct democracy generally support, but no actual democratic systems fully implement direct democracy. In practice what we generally have is representative democracy, where we delegate the power to make laws, and make and implement policy to representatives. Those representatives have personal moral responsibility for the laws and decisions they make and are sovereign individuals in t…
> 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…
There are many flavours of representative democracy. It depend what is being represented. In the British system that’s constituencies. In proportional systems, that’s political parties. Neither are particularly more or less inherently legitimate IMHO.
Ultimately whether a democracy and its system is legitimate rests on a consensus of the consent of the people to that system. I think would clearly ludicrous to argue that the British people do not consent to their system of government.