On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 05:46:20PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote: > At 05:02 PM 1/12/2014, Jim Bell wrote: > > >... Authorities, no doubt, would want to label this 'jury > >tampering'. > ><http:///>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_tampering However, it > >is likely that if no actual 'offer' is made to a specific juror, > >and 'everybody' simply KNOWS that these payments will occur (due > >to prior advertising and other publicity, and because other jurors > >have always been paid in the past), this should not run afoul of > >such laws. > > Of *course* they'd want to label it 'jury tampering', because it > *is* jury tampering. > It's an offer to bribe the jurors to acquit somebody they might > otherwise convict. > It directly runs afoul of jury tampering laws, and the only difference from > traditional jury tampering is that it *might* be easier not to get caught. > > I do prefer it to some other traditional kinds of jury tampering, > including the one where the government only allows prosecution-friendly > jurors, > and the one where the payment for acquittal is "not getting your legs broken". > (The latter, btw, also has some anonymity built into the payment mechanism, > since it's easy to deliver the payment anonymously to jurors who accept.) > But they're all perversions of justice.
I think some sort of "fund the campaign of the first politician to succeed in making said illegal behavior legal" is far more likely to have the desired results. I would argue that politicians are far more predictable than jurors, and then it's pretty clear you are making a free speech/change the law payout, rather than do something most people would think is shady. (Okay, most people think buying politicians is shady, but that feels like a much easier public relations game to win than bribing jurors) Anonymity is expensive, and if you can change the game to do what you wish publicly, and transparently, I expect it will cost a heck of a lot less per successful outcome. Lots of lawyers will publicly advertise services for campaign engineering. Very few will *publicly* advertise services for jury tampering.
