Posted on 01/08/2012 6:24:48 AM PST by djf
Tonight on Coast to Coast Ian Punnet will be interviewing Dr. Roger Roots on the fully informed jury movement.
This one could be a real barn-burner!!
How in the heck can those “entrusted” with our Justice system keep rational people (the real arbiters of Justice) in the dark and manipulate the system to suit if Jurists are kept informed?
I am having trouble understanding your question.
Care to rephrase it?
I think that was tongue-in-cheek.
I read it a couple times and figured a /sarcasm tag was missing but still wasn’t sure...
I NEED TO BE INFORMED!!
;-)
Yep - sometimes I assume the sarcasm tag is not really needed. I spend too much time in my own head and expect others to pick up on my “witticisms” without prodding. Should know better - it took my wife about 6 nyears to become attuned to my thought process.
Has there been another “landing” in Roswell?
Well, should be an interesting show.
It is interesting to know a bit about the history of fully informed juries. It was well accepted in early America that the juries had the right and duty to judge the defendant AS WELL AS JUDGE THE LAW!!
Until a case came before the Supreme Court. A person who had been convicted appealed to the Supreme Court because in the trial that convicted him, the jury was not informed of it’s right to judge the law. The defendant argued in the Supreme Court that this was a reversible error and the conviction should be overturned.
The SC disagreed, and said it was not an error. But the SC NEVER said the trial court could not be informed, just that it was not REQUIRED to be informed.
Sparf V Hanson, I forget the exact citation.
It’s also interesting that if an attorney tries to bring up FIJA or jury nullification, quicker than snot the judge will likely threaten him. Most likely not with contempt of court, most likely the judge will threaten him with being “disbarred”.
“Disbarred”???
Huh??
Stripped of his license to “practice” law?
Kicked out of a “private club”?
How did some private club take over the administration of justice in America?
An informed jury is one that is allowed to know it can say the law the defendant is charged under is wrong or too harsh and let the defendant go. It’s called jury nullification.
Present court rules do not allow the defendant or defendant’s lawyer to tell the jury it can vote not to convict as it would be fundamentally unfair to punish the defendant with this law or how it affects the fact situation at hand. As our state and national legislatures keep passing stupid laws with criminal or huge monetary fines, some otherwise innocent defendants get punished unfairly.
I served on a jury a few years ago. It was really an open and shut case of assault with a deadly weapon - 8 witnesses and a man with brain damage and lucky to be alive due to a terrible beating from a length of 2x4. My cohorts didn’t want to convict because the poor perp might serve jail time! I admit to castigating them and explaining the law they had sworn to uphold and laying out the case from beginning to end. They finally agreed to convict. Once the verdict was in, we were told that the guy was on the lam from another State for doing the same thing and that other State also had an open-shut case against him and wanted extradition to try him there too. While past actions don’t infer guilt, there are situations where they are extremely relevant.
IIRC, there was a man arrested outside the Casey Anthony (mother tried for killing 2 year old daughter Caylee, mother acquitted, to the shock and dismay of many) for passing out pamphlets.
“Kicked out of a “private club”?
How did some private club take over the administration of justice in America?”
That’s easy, an uninformed public (uninformed by “the watchdog of democracy” the media on purpose) sat by quietly and did nothing as lawyers made our laws. A legislator who is a lawyer has an automatic conflict of interest.
I heard or read something about a guy who got charged with some BS infraction.
From the beginning, he decided no lawyer, he would go it alone.
They started giving him things to sign before the trial could start and he refused to sign anything. They kept pestering him and threatening him but he kept refusing, saying basically he didn’t think he should need to sign something for justice to happen...
The case DID come before the judge but he never got called to trial and it was dismissed with prejudice, meaning they could not retry him.
I’m not sure how accurate the story was, the guy could have been making it up, but it makes you wonder...
And, on the same program, on a more topic more likely to come to pass than a reformed court system...
“First Hour: Bigfoot researcher & holistic health consultant Kewaunee Lapseritis tells his personal story of being telepathically contacted by a Sasquatch and an ET simultaneously.”
Not kidding. Check the link.
American justice could be radically transformed overnight.
If some dude has to call in, he ain’t way up there on the telepathy skill set!!
C2C often has some very interesting guests on various subjects, holistic health care, borderline science, cosmology, metaphysics. So interesting that I am a subscriber and if I miss a show, I can listen to it later.
But sometimes, they get some real whack-jobs.
This guy wasn’t in contact with aliens. More likely, he was in contact with a bit of windowpane...
Yikes! The one time I actually got on a jury we were given notepads. The rules were that they would be held by the court overnight if the case went over a day (it didn't) and they would be destroyed after the trial.
On another trial the jury pool was asked during voir dire whether any of us had heard of jury nullification. I was the only one to hold up my hand and the prosecutor asked my what I knew about it. I probably went into way too much detail and the prosecutor said maybe I was on the wrong side of the jury rail. Needless to say I wasn't chosen to be on the jury even though I was in the first twelve in the pool.
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