5/21/97
Interesting dateline. I presume the justices, being New Yorkers, will next move to posthumously overturn the token fine in the John Peter Zenger case, digging up the body of the 18th Century New York printer and hanging the mouldering remains from the nearest lamppost so all our history books can be rewritten to report that the jury was NOT allowed any choice but to punish Zenger for printing inconvenient truths about the king.
Then, given that all those northern juries
were obviously wrong to refuse to bring in convictions in "runaway
slave" cases in the 1850s, and given the likelihood that those slaves
would have been whipped to death if returned to their Southern masters,
I presume Judge Jose Cabranes and the
other New York justices will now order all the descendants of those runaway
slaves currently within their jurisdiction to be rounded up ... and put
to death? After all, their ancestors should never have been allowed to
live to bear children, since those juries "had no right to ignore
the evidence
or law in a case and instead impose their own values to acquit or convict
a defendant," actions which constitute "a violation of a juror's
sworn duty to follow the law as instructed by the court."
Review the case in question. The trial judge found a sole black juror refusing to convict because he believed the drug defendants had "a right to deal drugs." That is plainly true, on its face. The constitution grants the government NO power to prevent consensual commerce in products which the buyer wishes to use for self-medication ... medical liberty is clearly protected by the Ninth Amendment, and no law passed in violation of that or any other part of the Bill of Rights can be held to EVER have been valid (under the wise precedent of Marbury vs. Madison.)
Yet the trial judge -- who is MORE responsible to know and defend the Constitution than the average juror -- fired the recalcitrant juror, and allowed the remaining jurors to convict under the unconstitutional statute, 11-0.
This is substantively no different than allowing an 11-1 conviction. Do I hear 9-3? 7-5? The appeals court now orders a new trial ... a similar result to the proper original finding of a hung jury.
So far so good. But why is the trial judge not stripped of his robes and banned from the bench for life? He meddled in the jury room, and dismissed a jury for voting "the wrong way." What will he try the next time, stationing 12 armed bailiffs, one behind each chair in the jury room, noisily loading and cocking their revolvers whenever anyone appears ready to vote "Not guilty?"
The segment of the American populace who
should be most concerned about this arrogant, elitist trend should be police
officers. So far, when advising an armed suspect to "Give it up, and
I'll see you get a jury trial," the average cop has had a fair chance
of success. But once the
average suspect realizes that government-salaried judges now can and will
remove any juror who votes to acquit -- or who admits under questoning
that he might favor a defendant's view of the law over the government's
-- that suspect is far more likely to figure, "I'm dead anyway, and
I might as well take one lying government bureaucrat with me. I wish it
were a senator or a
judge or the commissioner of the IRS, but you have to take what God deals
you in this life, so I guess this poor cop's number just came up."
When those cops start dying, I hope the memorial wreaths will be laid on the doorsteps of jury-hating Judges Jose Cabranes, Edward Lumbard, and Joseph McLaughlin.
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