Brooklyn prosecutors back-pedaled yesterday on weapons charges against a Navy veteran who shot an intruder in his home - but would not drop the case. Prosecutor Dawn Flowers moved to reduce the charge against Ronald Dixon to attempted possession from illegal possession. A conviction would not require a jury trial and could land Dixon in prison for up to 90 days instead of a year.
"He says he had the gun," Flowers told Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge Alvin Yearwood. "There are no facts in dispute for a jury to find."
Dixon, 27, shot and wounded Ivan Thompson after catching the career burglar prowling in his toddler's room on December 14th 2002. Dixon is not charged in the shooting.
Defense attorney Andrew Friedman called the offer from the Brooklyn district attorney's office hypocritical. "I would suggest the people are seeking to avoid a jury case to prevent the citizens of Brooklyn from making a determination whether Dixon is guilty or not," Friedman said.
Yearwood will rule on the motion Tuesday.
Dixon gained widespread sympathy after he was charged with a crime for defending his family.
He said he bought his pistol in Florida, where gun purchases require no paperwork, and tried to register it here. Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes has said he found no proof the Jamaican immigrant attempted to make the gun legal in New York.
The district attorney first offered a plea deal that would have allowed Dixon to spend four weekends in jail. Dixon rejected that offer, saying he has to work every day to pay his mortgage and support his family.
Yesterday, Hynes spokesman Jerry Schmetterer said the DA is backing off slightly because the case calls for "tempering justice with mercy."
Dixon said he was disappointed in the new offer.
"I was hoping it was going to be dismissed," he said.
No, let the moron pour it on! Then take this to the SC and prove once and for all that the RKBA is an individual right and any law that affects that right must past very rigorous Constitutiona muster.
Why would you have to register the pistol? The purchase is recorded at the dealer and thats it. Gun registration was always a sticking point.
"Reasonable doubt" per se is not an issue in this case. The jury has every right to simply ignore all the evidence and let the defendant go.
Hope Dixon insists on a jury trial. Wish I could be on the jury.
Jurrors have every absolute right to disregard the instructions and rule their conscience. Jury nulification is a respected fact of life. HOWEVER, there can be no istruction to that effect by either party AND the santity of jury deliberations can be penetrated to determine if a conviction was issued because of race.
Jury nulification is a way of life in the criminal courts of Washington DC.
http://www.levellers.org/jrp/orig/jrp.vs3.htm But Don't Juries Only 'Try the Facts'?
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
J.M., a 20-year police veteran of the Drug War witch-hunts, responds to my recent columns on Laura Kriho, the Colorado juror who was put on trial last month for voting to acquit a drug defendant:
"Here's the way a jury is supposed to work, Mr. Suprynowicz, so you'll understand what's going on next time," J.M. writes. "In a jury trial, the jury is the trier of fact. Their job is to determine whether, based upon the evidence they're allowed to see, the person sitting there in the courtroom did the act which the prosecution is trying to prove. ... The judge is the trier of law. He or she will determine, again based upon the rules, whether the evidence gets admitted, how much the jury gets to hear, and stuff like that. ...
"If a juror can't do their duty properly, and trust in the system to provide justice, then they should say so at the outset, and get dismissed from the panel. If enough people do this, the courts will be unable to get juries in cases like this, and your problem is solved -- without having to resort to lying. And lying is what it is when a person gets on a panel by NOT speaking up. If that's what Kriho did, I've got no sympathy. She should be prosecuted," J.M. continues.
"Incidentally, this business about not discussing the sentence is also appropriate. It's none of the jury's business what the defendant is going to 'get' if he gets convicted. ..."
# # #
Ah, the old "jury judges only the facts" chestnut.
Why is it, then, that the Constitution of the state of Maryland -- which the Founding Fathers knew intimately -- states that the jury shall be the "trier of law and of fact"?
Noah Webster said he was publishing his first American dictionary in large measure to set forth the meaning of words as used by the Founders in the Declaration and Constitution, so those original meanings would not be lost. Webster, a prominent Federalist, defined the jury as the "trier of
law and of fact."
Surely the biggest court case in America in the generation before the Founding was that of John Peter Zenger. The New York printer and newspaper publisher was accused of printing libels against the King. The judge made it clear to defense attorney Andrew Hamilton as well as the jury that, under British law, "libel" meant a criticism, whether true or not. Truth was no defense.
Thus, Hamilton told the jury he had no allowable defense to offer, since he and Mr. Zenger had to admit that Mr. Zenger was indeed the publisher.
The judge instructed the jury that the defense had admitted publishing the criticism of the king in question, and thus that the jury had no choice but to find the defendant guilty. Yet the jury in 1735 unanimously found John Peter Zenger INNOCENT, establishing American freedom of the press for all time.
Do we today curse the names of these jurors who "violated their oaths"? Of course not. We celebrate their wisdom and their courage.
The Zenger jury did not only "try the facts" -- there was no dispute about the facts. The Zenger jury tried the law. They found the law was a [sic] ass, and they acquitted.
The Founders were all well aware of this case, and of the British tradition of juries judging the law as well as the facts -- heck, it was only after a jury disobeyed the judge's orders and freed William Penn on charges of preaching an "illegal" Quaker sermon in London, that the Penns emigrated to America and founded Pennsylvania, where both the Declaration and Constitution were signed.
If the Founders had wanted to go against that tradition, it would have been easy enough for them to write the Sixth Amendment to read: "... 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, which jury shall judge only the facts and not the law..." but they didn't do that, did they? Why not?
# # #
Because this fabricated nonsense about how juries -- drawn by random lot since the Ninth Century -- should now be stacked to contain only those who will swear in advance to obey the judge's orders instead of their own conscience, dismissing those honest enough to admit they oppose many a new piece of legislated puritanism, is a hideous betrayal of our tradition of freedom. The jury that freed William Penn in 1670 did so precisely because the judge refused to let them read the law Brother William was supposed to have violated. In fact, the judge refused even to read the law to them aloud. Our judges today have reverted to the same high-handed nonsense.
Juries can and should acquit in all cases where the judge refuses to let them carry the lawbook in question into the jury room. If the law can't be understood by a lay jury, how do we expect that it was to have been understood by the "lay" defendant?
No jury can in good conscience convict any fellow citizen of violating a law they cannot understand, or are not allowed to read for themselves. Our citizen juries have the absolute power to demand this, which they can enforce by simply acquitting in all cases where their demands are not met. The government has no appeal of an acquittal ... and this is precisely why.
The reason advocates of the current and ever-expanding police state fear the assertion of proper, traditional jury power is not because juries will go mad and free murderers and rapists who are obviously guilty -- we all know they won't -- but precisely because these stormtroopers know what will become of their precious "Drug War," as well as such tyrannical concepts as "illegal firearms," once modern jurors find out about our proud tradition of jury nullification, which led prosecutors to give up any attempt to prosecute those who harbored runaway slaves in the 1850s, or those who made wine in their basements during Prohibition.
Juries would have none of it, and we were quickly rid of such bad laws, passed in fits of political madness. But we are rid of them only because juries knew they had the power to ignore the orders
of both salaried government prosecutors -- the one in front of the bench, and the other one, in the black robes, behind the bench.
Why else would John Adams, who was to become the second president, have said in 1771: "It is not only his (the juror's) right, but his duty ... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, even though in direct opposition to the direction of the court"? (2 Life and Works of John Adams, 253-255; C.F. Adams ed. 1856.)
Why else would John Jay, first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, have said in charging the jury in Georgia vs. Brailsford, 1794, "You (the jurors) have, nevertheless, a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy"?
Why else would Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, have written in People vs. Croswell (1804): "That in criminal cases, the law and fact being always blended, the jury, for reasons of a political and peculiar nature, for the security of life and liberty, is intrusted with
the power of deciding both law and fact"?
The court only began to erode the jury's right to judge the law -- or more properly, to instruct the lower courts that it was no longer necessary to advise jurors of this right -- with Justice Harlan's execrable decision in Sparf and Hansen vs. the United States (1895.)
Look today at how peaceful our cities are, compared to the bucolic era of the 1890s. Why, the police today, on an average Saturday night in Detroit or New York, have nothing better to do than drink root beer while listening to the brass band in the park gazebo, do they? O, what a wonderfully sober and peaceful society our drug laws have given us, compared to 1895! O, what
a great job has been done by those who have expanded our lawbooks 20-fold since 1912, until ninja-clad government assassins can invade our homes and ruin our lives (if we survive at all) on the mere suspicion that we may possess harmless plant extracts which were as common as aspirin in grandma's medicine chest in 1895, or that we may be hoarding war souvenirs Uncle Bob brought home from Flanders fields in 1918.
# # #
But fortunately, the nonsense of the Sparf case cannot prevail. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals held as recently as 1969, in U.S. vs. Moylan, that "We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the 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."
And the District of Columbia Court of Appeals concurred in U.S. vs. Dougherty (1972): "The pages of history shine on instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard uncontradicted evidence and instructions of the judge. Most often commended are the 18th century
acquittal of Peter Zenger of seditious libel, on the plea of Andrew Hamilton, and the 19th century acquittals in prosecutions under the fugitive slave law."
Compassionate jurors have every right -- they may well have a duty of conscience -- to acquit young men of color who chose to exercise their right to keep and bear arms without seeking any stinking government permit, or young people of any color whose lives the government would ruin by punishing the consumption of mild intoxicants (or anything else they choose to consume -- see the Ninth Amendment) with years and years in jail, and they certainly do have a right and an obligation to consider the absurd penalties which our maddened politicians have slapped onto such harmless activities in order to win the votes of religious zealots like Mr. Matthews.
Indicted Colorado juror Laura Kriho (whose verdict had not yet been handed down, as of this writing) is an American hero -- though I doubt she set out to be one. And her prosecution -- by judges who reached into the jury room and are now attempting to censor what can be said there -- is a travesty against the rich thousand-year tradition of our liberties.
(For a more detailed analysis of the history of jury rights, see the well-researched article "Jury Nullification: Empowering the Jury as the Fourth Branch of Government," by retired justice of the Washington State Supreme Court William Goodloe, in the Summer, 1996 edition of the FIJActivist. The quarterly newsletter is available at $25 per year from the Fully Informed Jury Association, P.O. Box 59, Helmville, Mont. 59843, tel. 406-793-5550.)
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at
vin@intermind.net. The web site for the Suprynowicz column is at
http://www.nguworld.com/vindex/. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
Endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which is the right to kill any son-of-a-bitch who invades your home without your permission!