We don’t know if he’s intentionally misleading people. The article doesn’t discuss it.
Guy arrested for handing out pamphlets on jury nullifaction at courthouse. Guilty of jury tampering?
No but we have a pretty good guess since the government is not seeking to prosecute him for impersonating an officer of the court.
Whatever the legal standard is seems pretty clear this guy does not measure up to that one. Instead they are going for a dubious jury tampering charge (so not like they aren’t already reaching for something, anything to bust him with and stop him).
Sorry to resurrect this old thread but figured this is the best place for it.
(Deleted) - didn’t spot that this was an old thread.
My my my. Aren’t we the perfect sheep? Always do as you’re told? I hope not. I hope you have the capacity to realize that when a judge instructs a jury, the judge is the one jury tampering. When a judge tells a jury they must find a certain way or that they can not consider points of law or anything that the jurist deems significant to the case at hand, that judge is tampering with the jury’s duty to act without prejudice in their decision or conclusions. Who ever gave judges the right to act as judge, jury, prosecutor, and basically god in the courtroom? Could it have been judges? How do you feel about a judge’s use of contempt of court? This is a flagrant abuse of power by any judge who utilizes it. How is it even remotely fair and just for a judge to accuse, try, find guilty and sentence all in one quick action called contempt of court? Who ever said this is good and proper in any court is nuts and needs their head examined. As for the guy who is not even directing his information directly at jurists but to the general public, what makes him a nut job? Personally I thank him for his efforts to inform the public of the single most powerful tool in their arsenal to effect change in the laws and statutes that are unjust and unfair and un constitutional. Informing people that they can change the law through precedent because they know the law being used to convict someone is unjust should be taught in every school from day one. In fact the way the legal system operates should be more required a curiculum in the schools than anything else. After law should come finance and then history and math. Everyone knows english but grammar these days is atrocious but do you see any improvement on the horizon? Why people like you who are so sure of themselves need to lash out and call a person a nut job conspiracy theorist is just sad. He’s a retired chemist who understands that the war on drugs is a lie and a scam perpetrated by our govt to generate revenue and inflate the size of gov’t. Do you realize there are more police agencies in this country than in all the other countries combined? We have police agencies within police agencies within more agencies and even more within those. All used to chase down people who would like to use a different drug than alcohol. We have privatized jails now because the gov’t is too wasteful in their management and at the same time this privatization may look good, it is very bad. it makes a corporation that has as its duties to its shareholders the need to keep every bed in a jailcell full. Empty beds mean lost revenue to the company and shareholders. Thus you get lobbyists for the jails who want more laws passed that require jailtime. Because of this privatization, the U.S. has more people incarcerated than all other nations combined. Yea USA. Who do you think they will target after they put all the dopers in jail? Speeders? Jay walkers? People who curse in public?
Death to paragraph haters!
Just kidding. Fine them only.
Well fuck me. I was 100 percent right on the law in this case. What I didn’t expect was that a modern American judge would see all the way through the bullshit and actually find in favor of the right of free speech. Every once in a while my faith in the humanity and the judiciary enjoys a small revival.
Now can we fire the idiotic prosecutor for making this man’s life miserable?
Also, would the good professor post his pamphlet and make it public domain so that similar cranks for liberty can repeat his exact actions across this great country?
Technically the judge did not rule on the free speech aspect at all and merely noted the charge levied against Heicklen was inappropriate.
Complimentary tip: launching your argument with a snide insult like this one is a great way to ensure that nobody listens to anything you have to say.
Speak for yourself. I’ve always wanted to be a sheep.
I don’t know why people can even debate about this. The judge tells the jurors that they have to follow the law. They don’t. This means the judge is lying. Since he is lying, he is wrong. This OP was started about a guy who was trying to mitigate these lies by telling people the truth.
The guy lying is morally wrong. The guy telling the truth is morally right. That’s it. It’s irrelevant what the jury is supposed to do as long as judges continue lying to juries telling them that they can’t do something they can.
And I’m glad that, for once, the law agrees with what is moral.
Maybe you should try reading the six pages of debate that preceded your post, then- nearly all of which are from people who clearly understand the issue better than you.
They need to go a step further and include information on jury notification on every single briefing of the jurors by the judge
They need to subvert the justice system during every trial?
Its a legal right that juries have. Letting people know about it isn’t subversion. Not letting people know about it, trying to shut down knowledge and arrest people for promoting it IS subversion
I’ll just use the same argument as the anti-nullification people like to use as a response. If its wrong, legislate it and make it illegal.
I’m sure you can find it on the website of the Fully Informed Jury Association.
The whole point of this whole FIJA thing seems to be, to make any criminal law – e.g., that against marijuana possession – unenforceable, if it is unpopular enough that one might expect to find one person agin’ it out of six or twelve randomly chosen. (Also, to make juries feel better about acquitting sympathetic defendants, even where the law in question is noncontroversial.)
Well and good. But one thing I’ve never been clear on is how FIJA might be expected to affect jury trials in civil suits. I can assure you that any such jury impaneled has been carefully screened by both sides’ lawyers, and any potential juror with a detectable pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant bias has been kept out of it. So what difference would FIJA make?