Jury Nullification Constitutional Right
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Jury nullification is an effective way of countering prosecutorial abuse and limiting the power and intrusiveness of the legislature. The historical records indicate jury nullification played a major role in abolishing slavery, winning women’s suffrage, and the Repeal of Alcohol Prohibition.
Perhaps jury nullification will become the way the war on marijuana ends as happened in the Loren Swift case.
Juries are our last line of defense against the inappropriate use of power by the government.
Sam Smith wrote in What lawyers & judges won’t tell you about juries that according to the Yale Law Journal in 1964, during the first third of the 19th century judges did inform juries of the right, forcing lawyers to argue “the law — its interpretation and validity — to the jury.”
San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi noted that “jury nullification is a constitutional right that every individual person who is called for jury duty possesses, and unless we appreciate that right, we will lose it because the courts will take it from us.”
“I think jury nullification is going to be part of the answer regarding states’ rights in future cases,” said former jury foreman Charles Sackett.
Clay S. Conrad wrote the 1998 book Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, that
Central to the history of trial by jury is the right of jurors to vote “not guilty” if the law is unjust or unjustly applied.
When jurors acquit a factually guilty defendant, we say that the jury “nullified” the law. The Founding Fathers believed that juries in criminal trials had a role to play as the “conscience of the community,” and relied on juries’ “nullifying” to hold the government to the principles of the Constitution.
Yet over the last century and a half, this power of jurors has been derided and ignored by American courts, to the point that today few jurors are aware that an important part of their role is, in the words of the Supreme Court, to “prevent oppression by the government.”
The Words of the Founding Fathers
Jurors should acquit, even against the judge’s instruction…
if exercising their judgement with discretion and honesty
they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.
– Alexander Hamilton, 1804
It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty to find the verdict
according to his own best understanding, judgement and conscience,
though in direct opposition to the instruction of the court.
–John Adams, 1771
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man
by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
– Thomas Jefferson, 1789
It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made
by men of their choice, if the laws are so voluminous that they
cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood;
if they… undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows
what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow
– James Madison
Find out more at these links:
- FIJA : The Fully Informed Jury Association
- The Jury Rights Project
- History of Jury Nullification
- Juror’s Handbook
- The Citizen’s Rulebook
- Jury Nullification and the Rule of Law
- Jury Nullification : The Top Secret Constitutional Right
- An Essay on the Trial by Jury (1852)
- CRFC – Jury Nullification
- What Lawyers and Judges Won’t Tell You About Juries
- Jury Nullification Bibliography
“If a juror feels that the statute involved in any criminal offence is unfair, or that it infringes upon the defendant’s natural god-given unalienable or constitutional rights, then it is his duty to affirm that the offending statute is really no law at all and that the violation of it is no crime at all, for no one is bound to obey an unjust law.” — Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone
“For more than six hundred years– that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215–there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such law.” –Lysander Spooner, The Right of Juries
If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence. — 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, US v Moylan, 1969
Every jury in the land is tampered with and falsely instructed by the judge when it is told that it must accept as the law that which has been given to them, or that they can decide only the facts of the case. — Lord Denham, O’Connell v Rex (1884)
The jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both the law and the facts. — Justice Holmes, Homing v District of Columbia, 138 (1920)
When a jury acquits a defendant even though he or she clearly appears to be guilty, the acquittal conveys significant information about community attitudes and provides a guideline for future prosecutorial discretion…Because of the high acquittal rate in prohibition cases in the 1920s and early 1930s, prohibition laws could not be enforced. The repeal of these laws is traceable to the refusal of juries to convict those accused of alcohol traffic. — Sheflin and Van Dyke, Law and Contemporary Problems, 43, No. 4, 1980
Marijuana Parity Pricing
Agricultural producers, under economic attack for generations in the United States, need to receive parity pricing for their produce in order to begin another round of the economic cycle without debt. Forcing agricultural producers into debt at the beginning of the economic cycle impoverishes everyone except the financial services industry parasites who profit at everyone else’s expense.
Marijuana, cannabis, hemp or whatever you call it may well be the last agricultural crop grown in the United States that is capable of providing enough income to be worthwhile growing. Profitable agriculture only appears possible outside of a legal system created to benefit a pathological elite, by definition an activity pursued only by outlaws.
This fact alone proves the lie to the political theater misrepresenting open markets and free trade. The only open markets and free trade possible today operates outside of the licensing, regulation and taxation of our pathocracy.
The free and independent culture surrounding marijuana agriculture, even as harassed and persecuted as it is, may be one of the last widespread autonomous agricultural activities available to Americans. Today parity pricing only exists outside of the law.
While many now seek to end the illogical criminalization of this most useful of all plants it seems few wish to look with open eyes at the likely outcome of their success. The price all will pay to end the justified fear of taking a few tokes will be the end of all profitable agriculture.
The growing plea for outrageous taxation levels on every step of bringing marijuana to a legalized market will end the financial incentive to grow it. We are witnessing widespread voluntary servitude for the illusionary benefit of reduced persecution.
Notice I said “reduced persecution” and not the end of persecution. Perhaps people have grown so used to their enslavement within the panopticon that they have grown numb to how modern society has become penal and coercive in nature.
Few seem to realize that licensing, regulation and taxation requires the increased intrusion of an increasingly militant and corrupt government in personal private affairs. The idea that the decriminalization of marijuana will somehow stop the police from “crawling up your ass” is far from realistic.
As it stands, only the complete collapse of our pathocracy will allow the fair pricing of agricultural products. Perhaps then people will learn to manage money as a common resource and public utility rather than the private monopoly money is today.
With decriminalization, marijuana cultivation will eventually come under the control of government subsidized agribusiness as all other commercial crops already have. The one commercial crop still supporting many rural communities will cease to be profitable.
This all comes from confusing the symptoms of unjust persecution with the cause of unjust persecution. The entire population of marijuana decriminalization activists have been tricked into petitioning their oppressors for more oppression.
The oppressors desired this outcome and manipulated events so that people will come to them of their own free will begging for more laws, more regulations, more licensing requirements and more taxes. The people they have tricked now look only to the small areas their attention has been directed to and are not aware of the greater game at play.
By terrorizing marijuana enthusiasts with militarized domestic law enforcement, those who created, empowered and armed marijuana eradication teams in the first place now weigh the various options for profit and control the marijuana enthusiasts themselves propose. Once a common cause among most who opposed our pathocracy, marijuana decriminalization has become a niche issue apart from greater issues of social injustice.
Why not advocate the return to parity for all agriculture products? This would only return our entire economy to profitability and limit the power of the central banks.
Why accept any measure of government control over what we choose to put in our bodies at all? This would only free communities of people from the onerous violent intrusion of domestic armed forces.
How can anyone believe that with decriminalization of marijuana under the hand of oppression nothing else will change? Transferring the wealth of original production from an underground economy to our pathocracy will only strengthen those who have oppressed and terrorized us while weakening those who resisted them.
We will not have more freedom. We will have less freedom.
The rich will become richer and the poor will become poorer as the door closes upon the last opportunity to sell an agricultural product at parity. After all of this I can only hope that at least you will still be able to get high from smoking it.
But do not count on it.
What do you think?
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