Tag: justice

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Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom jury rights and duties U.S. Constitution

Guess Who Else Nullifies?

Jury Duty

Citizens have more power than they exercise. But folks in government aren’t exactly falling all over each other in the rush to help citizens participate and realize their potential.

Take juries. There are few more awesome responsibilities than sitting on a jury. And one of the things you can do, as a juror, is to refuse to follow the law or the judge, instead making your decision contrary to the immediate, official directive. Disapprove of a bureaucracy’s “legal” prosecution of an individual or group? Judge the law as well as the facts. Acquit.

Glenn Reynolds, writing in USA Today, shows that this practice has a long, honorable history in our country — he not unreasonably mentions how northern abolitionists fought the Fugitive Slave Act — and, if you, the juror, push it, “there’s nothing anyone can do about it…

Of course, prosecutors have essentially the same power, since they’re under no obligation to bring charges against even an obviously guilty defendant. But while the power of juries to let guilty people go free in the name of justice is treated as suspect and called “jury nullification,” the power of prosecutors to do the exact same thing is called “prosecutorial discretion,” and is treated not as a bug, but as a feature in our justice system.

Reynolds concisely makes the case that jury nullification is, itself, a designed feature of our American constitutional tradition, and not nearly so buggy as “prosecutorial discretion.”

Why? Its tendency is to liberate us from usurping government action.

Prosecutors’ “discretion” (on the other hand) gives folks in government more power over our lives. And ruins many.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Jury Duty

 

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crime and punishment general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies

Robert Reich Makes Common Cause With Police State

Police State Apologist, Facebook, Robert Reich, collage, photomontage, Paul Jacob, http://cognitivebiasparade.prosite.com/, political, politics

Common Cause says its job is “Holding Power Accountable.” Robert Reich is the pre-eminent “people’s progressive” propagandist of our time, promoting himself as on the side of underdogs and against corporate power structures.

After the Wisconsin John Doe probe was judicially squelched, last week, Reich promoted Common Causes’s official reaction, insisting that “Corruption — even the appearance of corruption — erodes our democracy. Corruption of our system of justice undermines strikes at the heart of our government.”

This is the Common Cause take:

The Wisconsin Supreme Court recently ended the investigation of possible illegal activity between Scott Walker’s 2011-2012 recall campaign and outside special interest groups.

Four of the justices of the court were the beneficiaries of dark money spent in their behalf and which was the heart of this case. They should have recused themselves and did not.

Robert Reich enthusiastically reiterated Common Cause’s demand for adoption and practice of strict judicial “recusal rules.”

Hmmm. No mention that a federal judge had also ordered the investigation shut down, but that ruling was stayed awaiting state court resolution.

No mention, by either Reich or Common Cause, of the methods the prosecutors used in this case, the gag rules and secrecy, the official attempt to squelch public discussion.

Also no mention of the pre-dawn raids, complete with SWAT teams, barking dogs, and pointed guns, as if the political activists (targeted for unsubstantiated campaign finance rule breaches) were violent drug dealers or terrorists.

The lack of mention of those tactics suggests not merely a lack of interest in the real rule-of-law questions, but also an acceptance of those tactics . . . when applied to political enemies.

That is worse than mere corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Police State Apologist

 

Categories
crime and punishment initiative, referendum, and recall

No Part Justice

Dr. Bosworth

Dr. Annette Bosworth was convicted last week on twelve felony counts. She now faces as many as 24 years in prison, $48,000 in fines . . . and the likely loss of her medical license.

Her crime? She circulated six nominating petitions to get on the South Dakota ballot in 2014. Thirty-seven people signed — at her medical office and at a Hutterite colony (where she sees patients) — while she was on a medical mission to help typhoon victims in the Philippines.

Dr. Bosworth’s sister was one.

But the affidavit on the petition reads that the circulator must actually witness each person’s signature being affixed. Bosworth should not have signed it.

Hence six counts of perjury and six more, one for each false document filed.

In court, Bosworth testified that her attorney — who legally notarized the petitions — told her she met the legal definition of a circulator.

Last month, I traveled to South Dakota to release a Citizens in Charge Foundation report on this prosecution. One key finding? While the threatened penalty is the most severe any American has ever faced in a petition-related case, Dr. Bosworth submitted signatures of people she knew and who very much did support her. No forgery, no fraud . . . against the voters.

In response, the state’s largest newspaper reported that, “[Attorney General Marty] Jackley said that it’s ‘well understood in state law’ that the offenses Bosworth faces are punishable by probation and not jail time.” Then after her conviction, Jackley suggested a presumption for “either no or limited actual jail time,” adding, “but that presumption can be overcome by a defendant’s conduct.”

Annette Bosworth should be held accountable. But aiming to ruin her life isn’t any part of justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Dr. Bosworth

 

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Accountability crime and punishment

Judge by the Results

Drug war results

The law exists to ensure responsibility. When someone does wrong, the police and courts are here to correct for the lapses and crimes.

That’s how law “holds us responsible” for our actions.

The War on Drugs is fought, it has been argued, because recreational drug use makes people irresponsible. So police and courts must punish, etc., etc.

But Theory must be judged not on intent, but on results.

Which are too often atrocious.

When I wrote about Bounkham “Bou-Bou” Phonesavanh before — a toddler horribly maimed and almost killed by an incendiary during a completely fruitless drug raid on a home full of innocents — I identified the War on Drugs as the root problem: “Waging that war permits endless ‘botched raids’ like the one that almost killed Bou Bou,” I wrote last February. “So long as such invasions remain a standard means of trying to catch dealers with their stash — indeed, so long as the War on Drugs is being waged at all — innocent persons will always be needlessly at risk. . . .”

Now that the trial is over and the family has been rewarded not quite a million bucks in recompense, we can see, clearly, what’s wrong here.

Irresponsibility.

The police who did the foul deed? Unrepentant in court, offering bizarre excuses. What the police assailants claimed, the Pro Libertate blog summarized, “is that while he was sleeping, Baby Bou-Bou ambushed them.” An overstatement? Perhaps — but very slight.

Meanwhile, who pays? The taxpayers. Not the guilty cops.

If we continue to allow this “war” we will continue getting unaccountable policing and the tragedies that necessarily result.

In a word: irresponsibility.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Drug war results

 

Categories
crime and punishment ideological culture

Against Protester Brutality

Most people agree about the wrongness of police brutality, if not about whether a particular police action is an example of it.

But what about protester brutality? Again, most oppose it. Still, skeptics on this point have been particularly loud and insistent lately. Some even suggest (or scream) that violence against the innocent is fully justified if that’s what it takes to protest injustice.

But the existence of police brutality does not justify protester brutality, protester vandalism, protester indifference-to-evidence, or any other violence or irrationality.

The grand jurors in Ferguson were not dealing with injustice in the abstract, but with a particular incident and the relevant evidence. They were not asked to determine whether police ever wrongly shoot or kill, but whether there was evidence that a particular officer had done so, enough to justify a trial. Even assuming legitimate grounds to disagree with their conclusion, too many commenters declaim as if the evidence is irrelevant and the jurors’ motives not possibly honest. The man had to be indicted regardless.

Of course, had Officer Wilson been tried, on this assumed-guilty approach only one outcome would have then been deemed acceptable, regardless of evidence: conviction. Absent that conviction, violence against the innocent would still have been rationalized.

No injustice is properly fought by either sweeping aside facts or by attacking the innocent in the name of protecting the innocent. If we ignore the requirements of justice in order to advance a Cause, how can that Cause be justice?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Accountability general freedom

Neither Left Nor Right

Sometimes you just have to scratch your head.

Nathan Koppel, in an article at the Wall Street Journal’s online site, finds it odd that a former Bush administration attorney is now in private practice arguing against a prosecutor who fabricated evidence in a murder suit. A similar piece at law.com, by Tony Mauro, proclaims that, “To Build Practice, Ex-Bush [Solicitor General] Embraces Liberal Clients.”

Now, I’m not exactly a conservative, but I make common cause with conservatives all the time. Many of my best friends are conservative, and so are some of my best ideas. So I ask you: Since when is defending a wrongfully convicted man against a lying, unjust prosecutor any more “liberal” than “conservative”?

Does conservatism really mean letting governments cook up evidence to throw innocents into prison?

No.

And yet both of these writers characterized former Solicitor General Paul Clement as somehow liberal and un-conservative for “embracing” — yes — “liberal clients.”

Well, a hug was involved. But if a lawyer ably defended you against a malign, immoral agent of the state, mightn’t you offer a hug?

Embraces aside, the issue at hand is neither conservative nor liberal. Americans — of any party — oppose injustice. Right?

Or: left?

This is not a matter of left-right disagreement. Or party politics. Or, even, America vs. other nations. It’s simple justice.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.