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Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

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Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#231

Post by scoopertrooper »

_8j50 wrote: post #222
jmeister wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the job of the legislature to fix the laws and make them aligned with your idea of justice.

Doesn't matter, judges have no obligatons to be just or fair. They just have to interpret the written law and precedent law as well as legislate themselves by way of precedent. Justice means to correct wrong and make it right. The law is written such that judges can apply their interpretation of it with no obligation towards reason or implied rights and wrongs by the legislature. Take asset forfeiture for example, th…

> Doesn't matter, judges have no obligatons to be just or fair.

Yeah, they are.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/453

> The legislature can't even stop companies from being treated as persons which any sane person will tell you is unreasonable or illogical.

I've never gotten why people are so opposed to the idea of corporations being treated as unnatural persons for certain purposes.

Companies are owned and operated by people with rights, so some of those rights transfer to the company. But, the owners agree to have some of their rights qualified when acting through a corporation in exchange for enjoying limited liability.

For instance, imagine you own a house under your own name. The government can't build a stadium on top of it without just compensation. Why should it be any different if you happened to have purchased that house through a corporation?

Corporations were a relatively recent invention in the context of the common law and treating them as qualified unnatural persons allowed them to integrate into the legal system without creating an entire parallel system. As a developer, I find it a pretty cute retrofit to the model.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#232

Post by parkingrift »

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.

If you think jury nullification is a potential problem just wait until you hear that district attorneys have almost absolute authority to decide what crimes are punished. One person can unilaterally dictate that petty theft is no longer a crime, for example.

In that lens I don’t believe jury nullification is much of a problem.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#234

Post by [deleted] »

notahacker wrote: post #198
makeitdouble wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think of this as an utter failure of the system, but lingering on this for a while: if the vast majority of citizens (= people who can meaningfully participate in the society) thinks lynching is a good thing, the jury nullification is only a step behind making lynching OK in the books for that group. Of course there could be upper laws blocking them from making it an official stance, but it really feels lik…

One must also remember that what people privately are willing to vote for (which in practice, probably means voting for a fringe alternative pro-lynching party, because nationwide parties have to appeal to anti-lynching constituencies too) is not the same thing as what they're willing to do when sat with 11 other local people being reminded that the whole town will learn which way they voted and some of the townsfolk…

[deleted]

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#235

Post by whimsicalism »

parkingrift wrote: post #232
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.

If you think jury nullification is a potential problem just wait until you hear that district attorneys have almost absolute authority to decide what crimes are punished. One person can unilaterally dictate that petty theft is no longer a crime, for example. In that lens I don’t believe jury nullification is much of a problem.

One person, who is typically elected. And that's if federal authorities decide to not get involved.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#236

Post by whimsicalism »

konschubert wrote: post #193
standardUser wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cops, prosecutors, DAs, judges, mayors and governors all have varying authority to "control what crimes are punished", in addition to who gets punished and the severity of that punishment. In that context, it doesn't seem so strange for juries to have some authority too. All this latitude among different actors in the justice system just shows how having an incredibly vast number of "crimes" on the books guarantees l…

Making everything illegal and then selectively enforcing it means that there is no Rule of Law.

There is no alternative to selective enforcement, nor has there ever been.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#237

Post by eru »

PeterisP wrote: post #225
eru wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

If a community really wants to severely punish something that's legally not a crime, jury nullification enables the community representatives to enact whatever extrajudicial punishment they want (e.g. the existing examples of lynching or "honor killings"/"honor rapes" in certain communities) and then protect these punishers from the legal system.

To a certain extent, yes, but the punishers need to be tried locally, too, for this to work.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#238

Post by whimsicalism »

gambiting wrote: post #158
nostromo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t try to get out of jury duty. Someone’s life is on the line. Suck it up and do your civic duty.

I believe jury duty is an awful way to decide justice and it shouldn't exist. Other countries manage without it just fine. In my opinion it's your civic duty to get out of it and not support it.

I believe that you likely came to the conclusion that most suited what you wanted to do.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#239

Post by JumpCrisscross »

DocTomoe wrote: post #224
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Traditionally, democracy meant 'all Athenian male unenslaved citizens meet up every now and then to decide by majority whom to banish from the city' -> the exact reason why democracy was a dirty word for classical political philosophers, like Plato: tyranny of the masses was built in from the start. What you describe was an "age of enlightenment"-style idealised version of democracy that lived for a short time before…

Democracy was discussed deeply and implanted varyingly after Athens fell. And even then, concepts of free and equal speech were tied to the concept.

> that direct democracy thing ... it works for the Swiss

We don’t have direct democracy. Our initiative and amendment processes have a referendum component, but it’s tightly moderated by the legislature and requires supermajorities to override it. And to the degree it's being discussed, it's with respect to reforming it so political parties can't bypass the parliament.

Re: Man arrested for promoting jury nullification wins federal case

#240

Post by tremon »

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."

Then why is the man referred to as Justice Holmes, not Law Holmes?
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