Posted on 08/02/2002 8:10:41 PM PDT by rhema
Edited on 04/13/2004 3:36:54 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
A June 24 letter writer applauds the Supreme Court's recent decision in Atkins vs. Virginia. He says that it "was right to declare the execution of mentally retarded inmates unconstitutional" because the practice of executing the mentally retarded is "grossly inhumane and fits within even the broadest definition of 'cruel and unusual punishment,' which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment."
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
If we continue to tolerate judges who "interpret" the Constitution to mean what they, in their infinite wisdom, think it ought to mean, rather than what the words themselves plainly mean, then that will be the end of the Bill of Rights.
Being above the law is nothing new for judges presiding over jury trials. Why congress is silent on this malevolent violation explains how government became a leviathan.
malevolent: having or exerting a malignant influence
malignant: characterized by progressive and uncontrolled growth
Discover How Judges that Preside
Over Jury Trials Routinely Violate the Constitution
"As a practical matter, I don't know how this is different from the beginning of a trial, when you tell the jurors you have to follow the law as I state it," Warren said. "I just won't give [the disapproved instruction]." California Supreme Court Don't Tell Jurors to Rat on Each Other
The above statement in bold told to jurors, since 1894 has been in violation of each Defendant's Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury.[1] The Sixth Amendment reads:
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed..."
Prior to 1894 judges routinely told jurors that they were to judge the facts and the law. ...And the law. For the defendant, a jury that judges the law upholds the defendant's right to a jury that is not partial for the government. It is the defendant's right to have a jury that judges the law as well as the facts.
To judge all facts in the case includes judging the most critical fact -- that a person was charged with breaking a certain and specific law or laws. Without that there can be no case to take to trial. It is the primary and most critical fact for which the government makes its case. Pressing criminal charges against a person gets the process in motion. The reason it must be the prosecution that gets the process started is because the suspect/defendant is innocent. Innocent until proven guilty in court.
Thus it was not the person's/defendant's actions that initiated force against any person or their property. For, until the defendant has received the verdict it is not known whether the arresting law enforcement officer acted in self-defense in correctly upholding the law or unknowingly acted with initiation of force while attempting to uphold the law. That is, the LEO making the arrest had reason to believe the person broke the law and then the DA (district attorney) pressed charges against the suspect. Yet the LEO/DA/government don't know for certain that the suspect/defendant broke the law. That detail will be answered by the jury.
What does it mean when the jury's verdict is an acquittal? It means the charges against the defendant were in error. That is, the defendant never broke the law he was charged with breaking. The law has been judged by the jury to have been wrongfully charged against the defendant. The jury says, "No. The law does not apply to the defendant breaking it. The law only applies in that the defendant abided the law." The law has been deemed to have been wrongfully applied -- the law does not apply to the defendant.
Guess what? That's what jury nullification is -- the jury discovers the same thing. That is, with jury nullification the jury decides that the law does not apply to the defendant -- the law had been wrongfully applied.
As per the Sixth Amendment the defendant has the right to an impartial trial wherein the jury judges the law. For there is no way the jury can avoid judging the law. The jury has only two choices, 1) the law was correctly applied/charged against the defendant, or 2) the law was wrongfully applied/charged against the defendant.
It is each judge's job responsibility to ensure that the defendant's Sixth Amendment rights are protected. The primary key to each trial is the laws that the defendant is charged to have violated. It is by way of the facts presented by the prosecution and the defense during the trial that the primary key -- law as charged -- is judged to have been correct or in error. The facts presented by the prosecution and defense are secondary. That's the nature of cause and effect relationships. When one thing cannot exist without the other first being present the first thing is primary and the effect of that is secondary.
It is accepted that the defendant acted in a manner that appeared to have broken the law and was one factor in the LEO's/DA's/government's judgment that the person's actions violated the law. It cannot be misconstrued that the defendant's actions are the primary cause. For the defendant is deemed innocent and only suspected to have broken the law. The primary cause is the LEO's/DA's/government's judgment to set the court process in motion -- not the suspect's actions.
As per the Sixth Amendment an impartial jury favors neither the government nor the defendant.
Each jury that each judge has failed to inform the jury that they are to judge the law as well as the facts as they pertain to the case/trial has caused each of those juries to favor the government over the defendant.
Since 1894 each judge that has presided over jury trials has routinely violated the constitution. Concurrently, each defendant in each of those trials has had his or her Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury violated. ....Violated by the judge presiding over the trial.
"At issue in People v. Engelman, 02 C.D.O.S. 6411, was California Jury Instruction 17.41.1, which judges give before deliberations. It directs jurors to advise the court if they suspect someone is refusing to discuss the evidence or plans to disregard the law." California Supreme Court Don't Tell Jurors to Rat on Each Other
As shown earlier the jury cannot disregard the law for it is the law that is the primary key being judged.
"Unless jurors are informed of their solemn responsibility to report misconduct, I predict that many judgments will be reversed simply because the trial judge never had the opportunity to cure the problem." California Supreme Court Don't Tell Jurors to Rat on Each Other
That is absurdly trivial compared to the fact that virtually every judge presiding over jury trials routinely violates defendants' Sixth Amendment rights. That's a valid reason why many judgments will be reversed. ...Reversed simply because the judge violated the defendant's Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury when he or she instructed the jury to favor the government over the defendant. The misconduct originates with the judges violation of each defendant's right to an impartial jury.
Why has congress remained silent
on this violation that has infested the courts?
It's interesting to note that jurors are enlisted and paid by the government and the judges turn them into co-conspirators in violating the constitution. Albeit the jurors are unaware that they are being incorporated into the judges' crimes. I think the legal term is misprision felony.
Where has congress been on this issue? Not a word. For it is the laws and congress that creates them that judges have been protecting.
Politicians and bureaucrats have a sop where they proclaim compassion by saying, "I'm going to use the government to help the little guy." Then politicians and bureaucrats -- sometimes aided by a complicit media -- fabricate a boogieman and claim to protect the little guy from it.
That in a nutshell is what Praetorian-guard judges protect. Separation of powers has long since been an illusion. Hand in hand congress and the department of justice has lead to this...
Congress has created so many laws that virtually every person and business is assured of breaking more than just traffic laws. On two separate occasions lawyers have stated that every business breaks the law on an almost daily basis. Surely with all this supposed lawlessness people and society should have long ago run head long into destruction. But it has not.
Instead, people and society have progressively prospered. Doing so despite politicians creating on average, 3,000 new laws each year which self-serving alphabet-agency bureaucrats implement/utilize to justify their usurped power and unearned paychecks. They both proclaim from on high -- with complicit endorsement from the media and academia -- that all those laws are "must-have" laws to thwart people and society from running headlong into self-destruction.
Again, despite not having this year's 3,000 must-have laws people and society increased prosperity for years and decades prior. How can it be that suddenly the people and the society they form has managed to be so prosperous for so long but suddenly they will run such great risk of destroying their self-created prosperity? Three hundred new laws each year is overkill, but 3,000 is, well, it's insane.
"Congress is rushing to pass a bill outlawing corporate fraud. If they really want to outlaw fraud, maybe they should just pass a bill outlawing Congress."
The government is the all time champion of cooking the books and it has the gall to point fingers at the whole business community because of a few bad apples. The government will forever be the all time undisputed champions at cooking the books. ...No company could ever come close to matching that wholesale fraud. All business frauds combined are dwarfed by government fraud.
The entire business community and employees that support it should stand tall against a government feigning to protect the little guy from organizations that cook their books.
If there was ever a prime example of the fox guarding the hen house it is the government claiming to protect the little guy from organizations that cook their books.
By a 63 percent-33 percent margin, Americans say the president and Congress should focus on prosecuting corporate wrongdoers rather than passing new laws. Severe economic downturn could bring 1930s-style reform
People are becoming acutely aware that their tax dollars are being used to create more and more new laws instead of serving to protect individual rights.
As long as State and Federal governments continue to extort income-tax from the creative working class the parasitical-politicians and self-serving bureaucrats will never run out of ways to spend the river of money to the net harm of the working class, the business community and society in general. When it's not the Democrats it's the Republicans -- often both.
However, President Bush can play the unbeatable five-ace hand of replacing the initiation-of-force IRS and graduated income tax with a consumption tax wherein if you don't want to pay the tax don't buy the item. Not only would that boom the economy while fighting off a looming economic inflation/recession possibly headed for depression it would win President Bush a 2004 reelection.
What are the odds of that happening?
When I was a kid a friend's father, Mr. Brown used to jokingly say to us neighborhood kids, "Which do you want, a fat lip or a busted eyebrow?" That wasn't lost on me. From Democrats you get one, from Republicans you get the other. Voting for the lesser of evils still begets evil.
Politics is not the solution, it's the problem. Honest business and science is the solution. It has always been the solution.
War of Two Worlds
Value Creators versus Value Destroyers
The first thing civilization must have is business/science. It's what the family needs so that its members can live creative, productive, happy lives. Business/science can survive, even thrive without government/bureaucracy.
Government/bureaucracy cannot survive without business/science. In general, business/science and family is the host and government/bureaucracy is a parasite.
Keep valid government services that protect private property/individual rights. ...Military defense, FBI, CIA, police and courts. With the rest of government striped away those few valid services would be several fold more efficient and effective than they are today.
Underwriters Laboratory is a private sector business that has to compete in a capitalist market. Underwriters laboratory is a good example of success where government fails.
Any government agency that is a value to people and society -- which there are but a few -- could better serve people by being in the private sector where competition demands maximum performance.
Wake up! They are the parasites. We are the host. We don't need them. They need us.
* * *
1. "Gray and Shiras (Justices), Dissent: Sparf and Hansen v. U.S., 156 U.S. 51, October Term, 1894. The classic opinion of the two dissenting justices on the case which effectively ended routine instruction of juries in their right to judge both law and fact. The majority ruled that while jurors do have the power to nullify the law, judges need not tell them about it, except in cases where state laws or constitutions specify that jurors must be told."
At least Justice Scalia has the guts to tell the truth about his colleagues and the way they twist the Constitution to fit their personal feelings. I don't say "their beliefs", because I'm sure they know the real intent of the authors.
What good is a constitution if it can be "interpreted" to mean something other than what it says in plain English? Words and phrases have meaning, if not, of what use are they? If words don't have well defined meanings readily understood by the conversationalists using them, we may as well just babble and gesticulate at one another and each of us decide for himself what message the other means to convey. Certainly not an efficient means of communication.
I believe that anyone with a reasonably good grasp of the English language and an IQ above room temperature in an igloo can "interpret" the Constitution. Sure, there are some archaic terms and phrases used in the old document, but it wasn't written so far back in time that the original meaning of those terms has been lost in the fog of antiquity. How is it that 9 chosen people can decipher the enigmatic code the authors used and the other 280 million of us can't? How is it that they can see that the actual words on parchment are meaningless, and only by means of their superior intellect and finely tuned intuition can the original intent of the authors by determined? Or, are the authors somehow transmitting telepathic revelations to those nine persons from beyond the grave?
If the authors had intended for their work to be interpreted to say whatever the courts decide it says, why did they waste an entire summer in a sweltering room hashing out their differences? If it was their intent to obfuscate the message and confuse the citizenry, they may as well have scrawled out a few pages of random gibberish in the first half hour of the convention and then told the courts to interpret it to say whatever they think, or rather, feel, it should say. The net effect of that process would have left us in pretty much the same situation as the one we are afflicted with now.
Your whole response is excellent, but this clause captures the essence of postmodernist, deconstructionist liberalism, I think.
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