**Bricker says:
No. The OP wasn’t “partially right.” He (and now you, with this assertion) are completely wrong. **
The OP said:
quote:
If there is a preponderance of evidence against an individual for violating a law you disagree with, do you have a responsibilty to find them guilty? Or do you have a responsibility to find them innocent.
My use of “preponderance” may not have clearly expressed the intent of my question, but I fail to see how a question by its very nature is right or “completely wrong.” Can you clarify?
Not only technically speaking, but legally speaking as well.
Long anecdote: My one experience on a jury was to determine the value of some land that the state was buying. The state provided a witness who testified the land was worth so-much. The owner of the land didn’t show up. The judge therefore instructed the jury that we would now find that the land was worth what the witness said. He said that if the other side had shown up, and presented an opposing witness, we could have picked either value or something in between; but since the other side didn’t show up, we would now find the land was worth what the state said it was.
This made most of us uncomfortable. Why didn’t the other side show up? Was it because they agreed? Was it a sick old lady in a wheelchair who couldn’t get to court? One person said that he didn’t feel comfortable making a decision without knowing why the landowner didn’t show up. The judge said, “Fine, you’re dismissed from the jury” and he pulled in another juror who would follow instructions.
In short, the juror is supposed to vote according to the law and the judge’s instructions, not his/her conscience.
Not to pee on your parade or anything, but are you aware that the United States Supreme Court stated, over a century ago, that this purported instruction from Chief Justice Jay is entirely bogus? Quite so. See Sparf v. U.S., 156 U.S. 51 (1895):
What about the quotes from all the other founding fathers? – Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Samuel Chase, etc, are you going to say that what they said about jury duty was bogus too? (We have plenty of founding fathers left to still have a parade)
Yes. The OP is wrong because “preponderance of the evidence” is not a general term - it is a specific term about a specific burden of proof, which is insufficient as a matter of law to sustain a criminal conviction.
I recognize that the OP likely didn’t know this, and used the term as shorthand for “enough evidence to find guilt.” But there’s a very important reason that we have differing standards of proof between a mere civil judgement and a criminal conviction. The former threatens only money; the latter, personal liberty.
So if I sounded harsh, I apologize - but it’s a key distinction to make.
Now that you have been apprised of the fact that the John Jay quote is a fabrication, are you going to stop using it?
Are you aware that the law can change over time? For example, before the 1960s, there was no Constitutional rule forbidding state courts from using evidence from a warrantless search at trial. After a case called Mapp v. Ohio, there was. But the rule was found in Constitutional language that existed since the 1800s! In other words, the constitutional law changed. Are you hip to that process?
I will have to cross check and read the entire thing, and put it into context. It remains to be seen if Jay was, in fact, in total disagreement with Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Samuel Chase, and all of the other founding fathers. At the moment, I dont recall Jay speaking out in disagreement at the time of the debates or during the constitutional convention/ratification, nor of him writing letters in protest during the ratification process of the Bill of Rights. If Jay was in total disagreement with the other founding fathers on this issue, then why was he silent on this issue during the convention? Why didnt he criticize the William Penn decision? This would have been great news and would have sparked controversy in the 1700’s if Jay was at odds with everyone else. That there was no apparent controversy during this time period, is strange, and I have no reason for it.
Yes, laws may change over time, but the Bill of Rights is not void “where prohibitied by law” .
Nothing said today, no laws passed today, no judge ruling today, no judges instructions, changes what the founding fathers intended as far as what a jury responsibility is. I will continue to vote guilty or not guilty when I am on a jury, as I see fit, and there is nothing you can do about it.
I recall a case-upheld on appeal-when a jury decided a case on a coin flip. This is in law school texts. I have to believe this was a civil, & not criminal case.
Okay, let’s examine a civil trial. The use of the term “guilty” may not be correct, but let’s just assume for the moment that a lay person sees the defendant in a civil trial being found to have violated whatever law it is the plaintiff has accused him/her of violating by a preponderance of the evidence (the accepted civil standard of proof – I worked on enough proposed jury instructions for civil trials some years ago to remember at least that much).
Taking out the legally weighted use of the term “guilty” and using it simply to mean that the party has been found against, why can a jury then note decide that the law which the defendant is accused of having broken is an illegal one?
Let’s say my neighbor cuts down the huge oak tree on his property that shades my yard as well (which, in this climate, is an important factor in reducing electric bills). Cutting down the oak tree violates a local statute. I take him to court for violating the local statute, and seek recompense for my prospectively increased air conditioning bills.
What can prevent the jury from deciding that the local law is stupid, that my neighbor can cut down any tree he damn well pleases, and that the judge’s direction to stay within the limits of his instructions are not accurate since the law itself is defective?
In other words, why do you think jury nullification could only apply to a criminal statute?
(We won’t discuss my genuine next-door-neighbors-the-treekillers, who own three houses down from us and have cut down EVERY SINGLE TREE on their properties. Fortunately, they can’t touch MY oak tree!)
If there is a preponderance of evidence against an individual for violating a law you disagree with, do you have a responsibilty to find them guilty? Or do you have a responsibility to find them innocent.
First off, I’m a Christian.
The Bible says that it will go well with those who convict the guilty. It also has some pretty strong words about punishing the innocent, too.
So basically it doesn’t matter what I think about the law in question. If the law of the land says it’s a no-no, and the evidence points to the person’s guilt, I gotta convict. If I disagree with the law, I have the right to try to change it, but letting someone guilty go free when they knew what they were doing is wrong is not the way to do it.
(Incidentally I’m of the opinion that jurors will vote however they want regardless of the evidence. There’s an expression that, in America, that while the lawyers are picking jurors, the jurors are picking a lawyer … and the trial is over when the jury has been seated. Unfortunately I think that’s how it works most of the time.)
Gee, you forgot the “HH” at the end of your message.
Bricker
That’s certainly an odd way of thinking. Would you avoid interfering with a lynching, on the theory that it’s better to provoke outrage than save the one man? Why stop any injustice?
Haven’t people been sent to jail for failing to pay a court judgement?
amarone
Where does the Bible give you the right to post on a message board?
butrscotch
His point was not that it can’t be applied to a civil statute, but that the OP mixed up the nomclamature of civil and criminal cases. Which apparently makes him “completely wrong”.
doctordoowop
That’s like saying “No, I don’t think our high prices are keeping customers away. Everyone who comes in here is willing to pay them”.
You do see how the former does not follow from the latter, don’t you?
BTW, the California statement by jurors is:
As I understand it, if the judges instructs the jury to disregard all statements made by black witnesses, the jury is obligated to follow that instruction. I don’t see how anyone can think that’s a good idea. What happens if someone refuses to say this? Are they just kicked off the jury? Is it that easy to avoid jury duty?
Any time the judge tells the jury “the jury will disregard that last statement” it automatically goes to Category 1 status in their memory … and it’ll be the ONLY thing the jury remembers from that day.
As a minor aside, the repeated citations to certain quotes from the founding fathers indicates, to me, a slight misinterpretation of their words. The fact that some early cases, and some founders, believed the jury could “decide the law as well as the facts.” does not support the proposition that there was a right to jury nullification. In a majority of the cited cases, the courts and advocates were dealing with general verdicts where there were the issues of finding of fact and law were entangled. The juror’s “right to decide the law” was limited to interpretation issues, and did not allow a juror to ignore the law and acquit just because they disagreed with a properly enacted law.
For example, Justice Chase found in U.S. v. Callender, 25 F. Case 239 (1800), that the jury did not have the right to determine whether a statute is Constitutional. He stated: “It is one thing to decie what the law is, on the facts proved, and another, and a very different thing, to determine that the statute produced is no law.” The fact that juries never had the right to determine the Constitutionality of a statute clearly indicates that jurors could not find against the law because of vague ideas of “higher justice.” The jury’s right to “determine the law” was limited to accepting the law that was enacted and interpreting it’s legal meaning as best they could, usually by deferring to the judge’s instructions. It didn’t necessarily allow a jury to ignore the law, but to interpret it, and it remained closely tied to general verdicts.
It seems to me judges are fairly frequently criticized for their overbroad interpretation of the law. By all rights it is the job of the legislature to pass laws and the job of the judges to enforce them. A high profile instance that comes to mind is when the Fla Supreme Court tried to reinterpret the legislatures meaning as to the time the vote count had to be submitted. They extended it based on their interpretation of the legislature’s intend rather than the actually days specified in the law itself. That the Federal court interceded had nothing to do with the language of the Florida state law. But this sort of thing always causes grumbling that the court acted inappropriately by inventing law rather than strictly interpreting it. They do it nonetheless in the opinion that they are rulers of their own domain and the big fish in their pond. IMHO, if a decision is made by a Jury rather than a judge, the same rules apply. The jury becomes the ultimate authority. There may be grumbling about the way they handled it, and there is an extra level of stone throwing since it is within the judges domain that the ruling is taking place. This doesn’t make the jury any less the ultimate authority, regardless of the judge’s instructions. To think otherwise negates any purpose in a jury trial. They would simply be rubberstamping his thoughts. This is what I read into the quotes of the founding fathers.