Shhh. Don’t interrupt a perfectly good ignorant rant with “facts” and stuff.
I’m not really interested in re-entering the debate here, especially now that it has moved on to the rather fraught issue of jury nullification.
But i just wanted to say this:
Random: can you please learn where the fucking apostrophe key is on your keyboard. Your use of asterisks instead of apostrophes is not cute or endearing; it’s annoying as hell, and detracts from your generally lucid arguments.
I am not doing it to be cute, or because I haven*t learned where the apostrophe is, as I have already explained.
Are you using one of these?
All i could find in this thread is a reference to being on “that keyset” again. I don’t know what keyset you’re talking about, and i don’t care. If you can’t stop the asterisks, maybe you should stop posting until you can. It looks stupid, and makes your posts resemble those of some high school usenet groupie.
Post 182 in this thread has a link to the explanation. And no, I*m not going to stop and switch keyboards every time I post here.
And your absurd overreaction makes you look like a jerk. Until you can calm down, maybe you should stop posting.
I’m perfectly calm. And i don’t need advice from morons, thanks very much.
But… if that’s your philosophy, why would you expect Random to listen to you?
Actually, that last post was unnecessary, especially on Christmas Eve. I retract it.
I dunno, man. That post was a little harsh for a bit of non-standard punctuation.
You might be right, but it’s gone on for this whole thread (and who knows how many other threads that Random has been involved in over the same period).
One of the things i like about this place is that it lacks the stupid leet speak and many of the other juvenile appendages that characterize so much of the internet. Smilies are at a minimum here (i’d like them reduced even further), and even our own little catchphrases (Hi Opal, etc.) are, thankfully, used only by a minority of posters. I find those things annoying too.
If Random was the sort of person who habitually posted stupid, content-free posts, this particular issue wouldn’t bug me, because i could skip the posts with no trouble. But that’s not the case. It’s precisely because Random’s posts are generally so interesting that i find this so annoying and distracting.
I’m going to stop complaining about it now. I’ve made my feelings known, and i don’t want to hijack this thread any further.
For all of those anti-nullification people in this thread:
[ul]
[li]Do you think nullification is 100% evil and without redeeming qualities all the time, period, regardless of circumstance and qualification, in any civilized court?[/li][li]If you answered the prior in the affirmative, should we still have juries picked from laypeople? Should we still have juries at all? After all, the judge is not blind and deaf to the facts of the case.[/li][li]If you answered the above by coming out against the traditional reading of “jury of one’s peers”, why do you think the Founders wrote the Constitution as they did?[/li][/ul]
Dude, c’mon. I like you, you’re a good guy, I’m really not looking for a fight… but how the hell can you criticize someone else for a wierd typing style? Capitalize your damned "i"s already!
Sorry, but I couldn’t let that go. Merry Christmas.
I, too, would like to see these questions answered.
No, I would not go that far. (Shit, now I sound like Data.)
If the law under which the defendant is being charged is somehow being imposed undemocratically, I can understand a jury*s decision to nullify. (The Zenger case comes to mind.)
By the way, mhendo, I do appreciate the compliments in your post, and I will ask the designer of the keyboard if there is some out-of-the-way method of generating an apostrophe.
(offtopic)
’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’ ’
There’s a whole bunch for you. Copy and paste at will. You do have CTRL C and CTRL V at your disposal, right?
Please forgive the intrusion, folks.
(/offtopic)
Maybe you could add a link in your sig. Something like “Sorry about the asterisks”?
[quote=Random]
I agree with Random; it’s possible to posit a situation where a jury nullified and it resulted in good – like Zenger, although it’s sad that we have to reach back nearly 300 years to find a time when jury nullification resulted in a good.
But if that’s the question you’re asking, it’s not really the point. You ought instead to be asking whether, if jury nullification were a rule of law – such that it were legal and permissible for a jury to ignore the law and the facts and base its decision on personal prejudice – would that be a bad thing? And the answer to that has to be yes: it is intrinsically wrong for a jury to violate its oath and base its decision on things other than the evidence and the law. Law shouldn’t be ad hoc; there ought to be rules with standard application so that people can guide their activities accordingly – including determining whether to oust a Legislature that passes laws we don’t like.
I don’t understand the connection between your first question and your second, but I will say that I think we ought still to have lay juries. I don’t understand why you seem to think an anti-jury nullification stance is incompatible with a belief in the jury system.
On old keyboards, I seem to recall shift-7 doing the trick. I don’t know if your keyboard is laid out like that, but give it a shot.