-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.20/pageone.html <A HREF="http://www.zolatimes.com/V3.20/pageone.html">Laissez Faire City Times - Volume 3 Issue 20 </A> ----- Laissez Faire City Times May 17, 1999 - Volume 3, Issue 20 Editor & Chief: Emile Zola ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Stormbringer by Don Lobo Tiggre Recently, CNN regaled us with images of tornado-devastated Oklahoma and Kansas—but the real twister that may well prove more significant was the decision rendered by the Colorado Court of Appeals in the matter of Laura Kriho (Court of Appeals # 97CA0700). Laura is the first fully-informed jury activist to be convicted for voting her conscience while serving on a jury, the first jurist to be prosecuted for such in 300 years, according to her attorney. The trouble started when Laura was called to serve on a jury in 1996. The case was what the prosecutors surely thought of as an open and shut Meth case. Laura was a hold-out juror, however, and she refused to convict. She also told the other jurors about their power to nullify bad laws and told them about the severe penalty that would befall the accused if she was found guilty (neither of which things had been brought up by the judge, of course). One of those jurors complained to the judge, Gilpin County District Court Judge Henry Nieto, and he, after thinking about it for three months, found Laura guilty of contempt of court in February of 1997. The reason? Laura had failed to disclose during voir dire the fact that she’d been tried (judgement deferred) for possession of LSD twelve years earlier. Laura is also a Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) activist, someone who believes that juries have the right to "nullify" bad laws by refusing to convict people accused of having violated them. Worse yet, she was involved in the Colorado Hemp Initiative Project—horrors! The problem for Judge Nieto—who rendered his decision without benefit of a jury’s help—was that Laura was never asked about her previous trial, nor her intentions to obey his instructions to the jury, nor her involvement in any drug legalization groups during voir dire. Consequently, the Colorado Court of Appeals did the right thing and issued an order reversing Judge Nieto’s contempt ruling. A Victory for Jury Rights Activists Some of the comments of the appeals court are almost uplifing. Judge Sandra Rothenberg, writing for the majority says: We thus adopt the conclusion in Thomas [a previous case dealing with evidence gathered in the jury room] that the secrecy of jury deliberations is a 'core principle' in the American system of justice, that excursions into the jury deliberation process are anathema to our system, and that jury secrecy may be invaded only under the most carefully delineated circumstances. ... The central principle of Thomas is that the need to preserve the secrecy of jury deliberations requires an investigation of juror misconduct to cease once 'any possibility' arises that the juror is acting during deliberations based on his or her view of the sufficiency of the evidence. We conclude that this remaining evidence, viewed in the light most favorable to the prosecution, is insufficient as a matter of law to find Kriho in contempt based on her alleged failure to reveal that she opposed the enforcement of drug laws through the courts, and her alleged failure to reveal that she did not intend to follow the judge's instructions on the law. Judge Rothenberg also wrote that Kriho was, "not under a duty to disclose" her association with the Hemp Initiative Project. More background on the Kriho case can be found at http://www.lrt.org/jrp.krihotoc.htm . Now, the state may renew its persecution of Laura Kriho on altered charges, but the essence of the appellate court’s decision was a momentous victory for jury rights activists. Judges can continue to tell jurors that they have no right to judge the law, and that they must only determine whether or not the accused has been shown to have broken the law. And judges certainly will continue to do so. However, the judge’s statements won’t matter, as long as jurors know that they are safe to say whatever they want in the jury room, and to also vote their consciences. Not everyone has heard of FIJA, but with on-going publicity, the day may soon come when it’s almost impossible to get a jury of 12 people together, none of whom have heard of their right to vote based on their own sense of right and wrong. And this opens the door to nullifying bad laws via the jury box—an option increasingly of interest top those who’ve been frustrated at the ballot box, and are not yet ready to resort to the cartridge box. Is Jury Nullification Good? But is this necessarily good? What if those who maintain that bad laws should be repealed (and not undermined by juries that refuse to convict) are right when they say fully-informed juries will damage the rule of law and destabilize society? As one judge put it: "Jury nullification is what you had in the old south when juries wouldn’t convict white people accused of murdering blacks." This may be so, but one has to wonder about a society where a obvious killer gets off free because of a popular irrelevancy. There are clearly deeper problems in such a society than can be addressed effectively with legislation. Also, while it may be that jury nullification can lead to a few guilty and truly dangerous people getting off free, it cannot alone lead to obviously innocent people being convicted—judges to have the power to set aside frivolous convictions. Protecting the innocent is much more important than convicting the guilty, at least in a free society where self-defense is a virtue. The few psychopaths who slip through the cracks in the legal system would most likely run into lethal corrective measures taken by a broader and more participatory justice system. That’s the ideal, but jury nullification still makes sense in the American society of here and now, because we have come to a point when most of the people going to jail never hurt anyone (with the possible exception of themselves). FIJA activists are not particularly interested in seeing murderers set loose to commit more crimes. But even if they were as interested in nullifying laws against violent crimes as they typically are interested in nullifying unconstitutional laws against "victimless crimes", pure chance would have them setting more harmless people free than people guilty of horrific acts of violence. That’s by pure chance, and chance alone is not what’s driving the informed jury movement. Jury nullification in general, and FIJA in particular, are therefore crucial assets to develop in the struggle for greater freedom. Jury nullification may not be a solution without liabilities, but, on average, could go a lot farther toward repealing bad laws than trying to get our corrupt electoral system to do so. To expect the U.S. Congress to stop the War On (Some) Drugs and other disastrous violations of the U.S. constitution and human rights in general is reminiscent of the parable of the camel and the eye of a needle. Jury nullification, on the other hand, allows concerned and informed individuals to take the law back from the parasites and try to see that justice is done. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ For more information, contact: Jury Rights Project ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) at: http://www.lrt.org/jrp.homepage.htm FIJA: http://www.fija.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don Lobo Tiggre is the author of Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a suspenseful thriller. Tiggre can be found at the Liberty Round Table and The Liberty Channel. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 3, No 20, May 17, 1999 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Published by Laissez Faire City Netcasting Group, Inc. Copyright 1998 - Trademark Registered with LFC Public Registrar All Rights Reserved ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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