February 15, 1997
From: Larry Dodge, FIJA co-founder
Email: lbdodge@flash.net
Laura Kriho's conviction by Judge Henry Nieto constitutes another blow to the right of all Americans to trial by jury, as that right was understood by the nation's founders, according to Larry Dodge, co-founder of FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association.
"The founders intended for trial juries to have a strong political role in the nation they designed, and that was to send public opinion on the law back to the lawmakers, by means of their verdicts," Dodge said. "Precisely because that gave juries the job of checking and balancing our entire system of government, those who govern have been trying ever since to destroy the power of the governed to say 'no' to bad law, or to bad applications of good law," Dodge states.
Dodge said that Judge Nieto's verdict, if allowed to stand, is "one more nail in the coffin of trial by jury. It joins other unconstitutional nails, such as eliminating jury trials for those accused of crimes punishable by less than six months in jail, cutting jury size down to less than twelve people, allowing verdicts by majority instead of unanimous votes, and allowing federal judges to decide if your lawsuit against the government 'merits' a trial by jury."
Dodge called Nieto's verdict "a self-serving misinterpretation of one of the U.S. Supreme Court's worst-ever decisions", in Sparf and Hansen v. U.S., 1895. In that decision, according to Dodge, "a bitterly divided court decided that it was not the duty of the judge to remind jurors of their power to decide against applying the law as given, but in so doing, it admitted that jurors indeed have this so-called 'nullification' power.
Until Judge Nieto's decision, this meant that you had to find out about your powers as a juror from some other source, such as brochures like the ones FIJA publishes, because judges no longer had to tell you about it, like they used to do before Sparf. Nieto has now distorted the decision in Sparf, which was bad enough as it stood, to mean that you can be prosecuted simply for finding out about your power as a juror and not saying so during jury selection."
"What it comes down to is that the courts can now use police power to eliminate anyone from a jury who has qualms about the law, and therefore stack the jury with 'yes' men and women. It means that trial by jury is a meaningless ritual which masks what's really going on, which is trial by government," Dodge said.
Larry Dodge, Co-founder and Vice President,
Board of Directors, Fully Informed Jury Association
Email: lbdodge@flash.net
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