Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/nyregion/26jury.html?hp

by mhb • 15 years ago

54 49 15 years ago

nytimes.com

thailandstartup4• 15 years ago

There's a jury that i'd like to be on!

monochromatic• 15 years ago

I was pretty much on his side until this:

> Mr. Heicklen has sued the government and various hospitals to which he was taken after being issued citations and falling to the ground.

He sued the hospitals? What did they do wrong?

thailandstartup4• 15 years ago

More info here . . . http://tyrannyfighters.com/progress-report-2010-12-20/

The purpose of the hospital visits is to perform what is euphemistically referred to as extraordinary rendition. In each incident, the hospitals, ambulance personnel and the police knew that I had no medical problem. The hospitals are in collusion with the police to perform torture. At the hospitals, I have been sodomized, had a plug driven up my left nostril (extremely painful), had my corneas “dusted” with a brush, beaten black and blue on my chest, and forcefully injected with thorazine on two occasions against my expressed wishes. Two days after one of these hospital visits, I saw my physician, who looked at my chest and exclaimed: “Did the police do that to you?” I answered: “No, it was not the police. It was the hospital personnel.”

isleyaardvark3• 15 years ago

In the NYT article it sounds like he intentionally collapsed and then they took him to the hospital. From the above link it sounds like the police just took him to the hospital because they wanted to.

"I have been arrested 9 times. The proper procedure for police is to take the arrestee to a magistrate. This happened twice. On 7 occasions, I was taken to hospitals (3 times to NY Downtown Hospital, 3 times to Bellevue Medical Center, and once to Saint Vincent Catholic Hospital)."

I can't help but think of the recent case of the NYPD who was forcefully admitted to a psych ward because he was a whistleblower.

ezy• 15 years ago

Ok, is there any direct evidence of this? Let's just say that I've seen this type of crusading before, and that formal, yet highly aggressive letter doesn't really assuage my suspicious feelings about the man and his motives... or, I suspect, the judges feelings. :-)

lukifer• 15 years ago

The Streisand Effect in action: by literally turning the issue into a federal case, the prosecutors are guaranteeing that more Americans will learn about the concept of jury nullification than from merely handing out pamphlets on the street. I wouldn't be surprised if he intended to provoke the case all along.

CWuestefeld8• 15 years ago

This is certainly true. In past events, Julian has notified the media that something interesting might happen. (And the police have harassed his friends who have photographed and filmed these events, going as far as arresting them and confiscating their cameras, as I recall)

(fwiw, I've never met Julian, but I've communicated with him by email and get regular updates on his work)

ajays3• 15 years ago

I was for him till I read this:

   In one recent letter to the court, he said he wanted
   Muslims “excluded from the jury” because he was Jewish and
   “Islam preaches death to Jews.”

Now he comes off as some old racist, cranky dude. [Edit: I still do think what he's doing is admirable and very noteworthy. I was just saying that that single quote makes it easy for people to dismiss him and why he's doing what he's doing.]

CWuestefeld8• 15 years ago

Julian is cranky, and I've occasionally disagreed with some of the details of his claims. But that doesn't invalidate the core truth of what he's fighting for.

rorrr• 15 years ago

Racist? Which race is he against?

ajays3• 15 years ago

You're right. I guess there's no comparable word for someone who's biased against followers of a particular religion, as there is one for someone who's biased against a race. So I used 'racist' as a proxy. Does my use of that word somehow take away from the point?

ahi• 15 years ago

This may or may not have been taken out of context. The way it was tacked on to the end of the article makes me wonder about the source. How did the writer get that quote? The writer definitely wasn't digging through court filings. Likely from the prosecutor or opponent of the professor. It's not hard to imagine a context where he uses that in a reductio ad absurdum argument that a judge/prosecutor intentionally misrepresents.

thailandstartup4• 15 years ago

When I read that at first, I though he meant that he thought Muslims should be excluded from all juries. However I think his correspondence with the court is in relation to his own trial - so he was talking about one specific jury.

It might be moot point though - Ironically, I have read that he is not likely to get a jury for his trial.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

"Ironically, I have read that he is not likely to get a jury for his trial."

How does that legally work? Surely if he wants one, he is entitled to one.

CWuestefeld8• 15 years ago

In other jury nullification news:

A judge in Florida has moved beyond merely forbidding the act of jury nullification in his courtroom. He's also banning advocates from letting anyone know about it.

http://reason.com/blog/2011/02/08/judge-orders-prior-restrai...

afhof• 15 years ago

I would have to disagree with this mans views that jurors should ignore the law if they disagree with it. I appeal to the Categorical Imperative on this one which states that you should only act by moral rules that you can at the same time apply to be universal moral laws. If every juror could ignore the law then there would be no point to having a law; it would be a contradiction.

Instead he should be trying to change laws he disagrees with.

[EDIT]: grammar.

CWuestefeld8• 15 years ago

This logic is incorrect; you could apply the same argument anywhere in our government: to the Legislature for failing to see what the Courts deem that the Constitution says; to the Courts for finding that the Legislature is wrong; to the Executive, for not enforcing the laws as intended, etc.

The whole point of our system is one of checks and balances: when part of the system gets out of line, it can still be corrected elsewhere in the system. This is exactly what jury nullification does. When the government's laws get out of hand, when they're not listening to the populace (both of which apply today, I would submit), the People have final veto power, on a case-by-case basis, through the jury system. Indeed, this is precisely why the Constitution guarantees the right to a jury trial: otherwise, we could just have a computer keep score.

It beats the next chance for citizens to put a check on the government, by using the 2nd Amendment.

nooneelse2• 15 years ago

Quite right in the main. However, there are several other chances for a citizen check between jury nullification and guns. Peaceful protest for instance. Nonviolent, civil disobedience for another.

drstrangevibes2• 15 years ago

a jury has more power in deciding a case than a judge, the sad fact is that all too often juries are bullied into believing that they cant exercise this power by the judge and advocates. it can never be a crime to inform people of thier rights

drstrangevibes2• 15 years ago

Despite heavy pressure from the Lord Mayor to convict Penn, the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty". When invited by the judge to reconsider their verdict and to select a new foreman, they refused and were sent to a cell over several nights to mull over their decision. The Lord Mayor then told the jury, "You shall go together and bring in another verdict, or you shall starve", and not only had Penn sent to jail in loathsome Newgate Prison (on a charge of contempt of court), but the full jury followed him, and they were additionally fined the equivalent of a year’s wages each.[52][53] The members of the jury, fighting their case from prison in what became known as Bushel's Case, managed to win the right for all English juries to be free from the control of judges.[54] This case was one of the more important trials that shaped the future concept of American freedom (see jury nullification)[55] and was a victory for the use of the writ of habeas corpus as a means of freeing those unlawfully detained.

chloraphil• 15 years ago

source?

tzs2• 15 years ago

    “I don’t want them to nullify the murder laws,” he said.  
    “I’m a big law-and-order guy when it comes to real crime.”

    But, he said, there were other laws he wanted to nullify,
    like drug and gambling laws.

You can't get one without the other. There is no murderer that some don't consider unjustly prosecuted. For instance there are a lot of people that would use nullification if told about it when trying someone accused of killing an abortion doctor.

Worse, once you tell a jury they can judge the law you will get juries that go for anti-nullification--that is, they will convict the defendant even though they do not believe he broke the law. In this case at least the judge or an appeals court can reverse the conviction...if they can tell it happened. In many cases they won't be able to tell. In most cases, the prosecution alleges a set of facts that if true support conviction, and the defense alleges that those facts are not true. There is no way in general for the judge or the appeals court to distinguish between "jury believed prosecutor's alleged facts and so convicted" and "jury believed defendant's view of facts but convicted anyway".

Another problem is different outcomes for similar defendants. If 5-6% of people think that a particular law should not have passed, and a unanimous jury of 12 is required for conviction, then 50% of guilty defendants get a jury that will not convict.

It's really hard to design a system of checks and balances where you tell juries about nullification but somehow stop the bad outcomes I described above. The best anyone has been able to come up with is to not tell the jury about it. The idea then is that it is only applied in cases where some juror decides that his conscious would find convicting so wrong that he must violate his oath.

CWuestefeld8• 15 years ago

You can't get one without the other.

I don't think you're reading his comment correctly:

> "I don’t want them to nullify the murder laws," he said.

I read this to say that he doesn't want it to happen, i.e., he hopes that it will not. He never says that such an outcome ought to be forbidden, just that it's not desired.

cabalamat• 15 years ago

> It's really hard to design a system of checks and balances where you tell juries about nullification but somehow stop the bad outcomes I described above. The best anyone has been able to come up with is to not tell the jury about it.

Given that the internet exists, how do you propose to keep jurors ignorant of it?

mlloyd• 15 years ago

Even without the internet, if an idea exists then knowledge of it will spread unless it's kept a strict secret. Further, protecting a system by promoting ignorance of said system protects neither the system nor the people it's designed to serve. Rather it endangers everyone who is beholden to it as the system goes further and further off the rails to justify increasingly erratic behavior. Classic spirit of the law vs. letter of the law debate.

ScottBurson• 15 years ago

While it's true we don't want juries nullifying casually, it would be a great loss if they never did it at all. The jurors are the only people in the system who are not answerable to anyone else -- not the appellate courts, not the DA, not the voters. When the system is corrupt, as at various times and places it certainly has been and continues to be, jury nullification is in some cases the only way a just verdict can be reached.

No, it's not perfect, but neither is the system it's intended to counterbalance. I believe that the possibility of jury nullification is the most important reason that the Constitution guarantees a trial by jury.

dantheman• 15 years ago

Nullification is a check against the power of the state. Jury nullification was used all the time in the North to protect escaped slaves.

tzs2• 15 years ago

Yes, but look at the South where it was hard to get a white jury to convict a white defendant for a crime against a black. That's nullification too.

burgerbrain4• 15 years ago

And you can't have true freedom of speech while simultaneously preventing people from being jerks and saying mean things. Surely not telling people they have freedom of speech is an absurd solution.

The consequences of legally obligating a jury to rule as the judge feels is proper are MUCH worse than any of the consequences you have described.

dpatru3• 15 years ago

The whole point of a jury is that it is a check on government power. Before a person can be convicted of a serious crime, a jury of his peers, not just the government, must convict him.

Your hypothetical of a jury maliciously convicting even without evidence is a misleading one. In order for a false conviction to take place, someone in the government must have already screwed up: the police who investigate, the prosecutor who brings the charges, the judge or the grand jury who determine the sufficiency of the evidence, the prosecutor who decided to bring the case, the judge who allowed a biased jury to be seated, etc. Also, in most states, the defendant has the right to waive his right to a jury trial, so a defendant who is wrongly and maliciously convicted by a jury chose to be tried by a jury instead of the judge.

If a defendant is so unfortunate as to be tried in a place where both the government and his peers on the jury are willing to maliciously break the law to convict him, then no legal system would be able to help him. Trial by jury affords defendants some protection against the government, but it does not guarantee perfect justice all the time.

miles• 15 years ago

As John Adams said, “It is not only his right but also his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.”

More recently, the following decisions have upheld jury nullification:

The jury has an “unreviewable and irreversible power ... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge. The pages of history shine upon instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard uncontradicted evidence and instructions of the judge. Most often commended are the 18th century acquittal of Peter Zenger of seditious libel, on the plea of Andrew Hamilton, and the 19th century acquittals in prosecutions under the fugitive slave law." - U.S. vs Dougherty, 473 F 2d 1113, 1139 (1972)

"If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused, is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic of passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision." - U.S. vs Moylan, 417 F 2d 1002, 1006 (1969)

And finally, from two of America’s Founding Fathers:

"... you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy." - John Jay, First Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court

"The jury has the Right to judge both the law and the facts." - Samuel Chase, Supreme Court Justice and signer of the Declaration of Independence

Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment

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