If the legal system takes away his home, would the community come together and buy him another one?
I agree with the King on this. A bad law won’t get changed or dropped if we enforce it arbitralilyagainst “them.” It might do more good for the previously mentioned “big picture” if a few of the nice, harmless people get prosecuted. Then maybe folks will care enough to amend the law. Personally, I’d rather have the law removed than let the authorities just decide when to enforce it. A law that is not enforced equally, but only when the police want to, is not a law. It is capriciously-applied power. But that also means that this guy should be prosecuted. Apply the rules equally.
So, the guy’s got a pound of pot in the freezer, and 12 plants going?
If we’re not allowed to talk about prices, someone feel free to PM me with more info.
But, let’s say a pound of pot is worth $1000. He’s smoking half of it, for sure. Probably sharing the rest. But let’s pretend he is actually dealing $500 worth of pot per year. That’s ::tap, tap, tap:: about $42/month. A real drug pin, this guy. I’m sure that pays the mortgage, utilities, and food.
I’d love to be able to grow a few pot plants without fear. I’ve got a Salvia divinorum plant I’m nursing along, and I’ll never use for anything. They want to make that illegal, too.
Ah, no, I apologize. My mistake. :smack:
Yeah, this. It totally sucks that this guy is being targeted. But it sucks that ANYONE gets targeted under the current laws. A friend of mine, who was a mid level dealer (that is, he grew it, quite a bit of it -hydroponic specialty stuff, expensive stuff. He smoked a heckofa lot of it and gave even more of it away, and yeah, he sold some as well, but he wasn’t a kingpin or anything) and I told him the same thing: “Dude, that totally sucks. But, y’know, it’s not like you didn’t know the penalty going in…”
Civil disobedience means taking the punishment and making enough noise about it that other people feel ashamed of their laws and change them, not avoiding the punishment entirely.
That’s right… but this has been going on for quite some time. We’ve already reached the point of ridiculousness back in the 70’s. This has been done ad infinitum - I’m sure you know… My posts upthread were just normal bitching…carry on.
Jury nullification is a form of civil disobedience too.
Oh, I know, and I agree with you really, you know. That is, I agree that it’s all ridiculous and no one should go to jail for this. It’s just that Hypno-Toad is right. If this guy doesn’t go to jail, that’s a whole 'nother kind of miscarriage of justice, and a far worse one in the long run.
Stupid, stupid drug laws. Hey, wanna go get drunk and beat each other up? At least we won’t be breaking any laws. :rolleyes:
Heh! Sad but true. You can get drunk and beat each other up legally, but it’s illegal to puff a joint and talk philosophy whilst eating a burger. :rolleyes:
Is it a double standard? For the law maybe - depends on the law. Some laws are specifically geared to have wiggle room depending on circumstances. That’s why sentencing is often done in ranges of time, not a specific time. The judge way have leeway in which case he certainly has the right to cater the punishment to the offense. Is it up to the judge whether to confiscate the home or the arresting police?
I definitely think seizure laws are obscene. Especially when police are encouraged to confiscate property in order to make money for the department. And drug laws in general are pretty obscene.
It is a double standard for the community? No. They have the right to their own opinions of what they consider justice. They don’t get to decide anyway. If it’s legal for community opinion to factor into the legal proceedings then by all means let their feelings influence the outcome. If it’s not legal then it’s a moot point.
In any case it’s not like he’s some rich dude who is buying his freedom. Factoring in community values about the person and the (non) severeness of the particulars of the offense is not a corruption of fairness.
Does this mean the police can kill his dogs?
The fallacy of your argument is that the jury-of-one’s-peers requirement means that each defendant is judged by people who consider him “the right kind”.
:dubious: So you’re telling me an inner city drug kingpin will be judged by a jury of other inner city drug kingpins? Riiiiiight.
“Peers” means “people who are registered to vote and live in your state” not “people who are your peeps”.
Jury nullification may be a form of civil disobedience. But I think it’s almost always the wrong one.
Consider: the purpose of civil disobedience is to remove in the public mind the justification for a law by showing that ordinary decent people will violate it, not for personal gain or satisfaction, but simply because it is an unjust law. As WhyNot pointed out, the only moral force it has comes from the willing acceptance of punishment for the transgression – a reassurance that they believe in the rule of law, and a testament to the seriousness of their intent. It’s about forcing abuse of authority into the open by making it apply, publicly, to “people like us,” no matter which “us” is yours.
Jury nullification, on the other hand, is an expression of contempt not for any unjust law, but for the rule of law itself. The only thing broken is the faith that a jury can be trusted to find, without fear nor favor, according to the facts and the letter of the law. However much one deplores a particular law or loves a particular defendant or hates the way a prosecutor wears her hair, this faith is not the part of the system that needs to be undermined. In fact, it’s the part that needs to be preserved, at all costs, if you care about a free society.
Here’s a guy who broke the law in furtherance of his own personal satisfaction, if not profit. Jury nullification in his case would not be a repudiation of the law, just of the idea that we’re all equal under it, and it would decrease the chances that the law will ever be changed. The pleading on his behalf is hypocritical and shameful.
Steve MB, that’s not what jury of one’s peers means, and even if it were, it isn’t practiced that way anyhow.
Let’s say you’re on a jury for a miscegnation trial. A black man is on trial for having consensual sex with a white woman. It is unquestionably against law (in this hypothesis) for a black man to have sex with a white woman. If you follow the law, he will be hanged (I know it’s a far out hypothesis but I’m being extreme to make a point, and at one time, this wasn’t far from reality). Do you follow the law and vote to convict in the hope that the injustice will inspire change, or do you vote to nullify and save the man’s life.
I’m not crazy about sacrificing the person who’s actually on the chopping block as a way to hope for larger change. I don’t see that sacrifice as my decision to make. If I can save this guy right now, that’s what I’m going to do.
I’m with the “he did the crime, now he has to do the time” group on this, but I think that confiscation of his home is too extreme a punishment. I also think that the drug enforcement laws in this country, particularly as they apply to marijuana, are a joke. Most drugs should be legalized, licensed, and taxed, just like alcohol and tobacco are.
I also learned something reading this thread. I had always been under the impression (and I have no idea where this came from) that “jury nullification” referred to situations where a judge overturned a jury’s verdict because he felt that they had disregarded the law in making their decision.
Okay, let’s imagine a world in which your point of view is the only thing that can prevent the death of a morally blameless black man under an inherently discriminatory law rooted in wrong and racist thinking. Can we also make him a virtuoso violinist and Nobel Prize-winning neurosurgeon who recently saved the governor’s niece from an erupting volcano? And can we imagine that instead of being merely killed, he and his whole family and Santa Claus and a bunny rabbit are tortured to death on Christmas Eve? Now we’re winning, right?
Wrong. Sorry. You are describing an unjust law and prescribing a “remedy” that destroys the only force around capable of successfully opposing unjust legislation without violence, without ever specifically addressing the law you hate. Your attempt at nullification might be defended as a single isolated humanitarian gesture, but as civil disobedience, it’s bunk. It’s probably worth remembering (it wasn’t that long ago) that legal expressions of racism in the U.S. were mostly fought with the kind of civil disobedience that respected the judiciary and its authority and the constraints under which it works, even as it deplored and disobeyed the laws that branch is expected to enforce. This wasn’t collaboration, it was equal parts courage and wisdom: the courts (eventually) led the fight against institutionalized racism, and they could never have done so had well-meaning protestors undermined their authority before the country. Essentially, your artificial (and grossly unrealistic: miscegenation laws were rarely enforced and were never punishable by death) scenario is about the same as constructing hypothetical circumstances under which each single soldier’s life might be saved during the course of a war: the hypothesis collapses when subjected to a tiny fraction of the weight of reality, and does nothing to either win or lose or end the war.
Even in a society with some unjust laws, most laws work to protect the orderly functioning of a civil society. People who will never set foot in a courtroom have reason to be grateful for the branch of government created as a brake on executive and legislative authority, and would be wise to direct their protests against certain curtailments of their liberty at the offensive laws themselves, rather than at the institutions guaranteeing their right to do so.
Now it’s my turn. Let’s say a well-known and respected, white, outright owner of a quarter-million-dollar property who knows all the right people is on trial for an offense that is a slam-dunk conviction with prison time for thousands every year, but he has every reason to expect an acquittal because everybody knows he is just not one of those people whom everybody knows the law was designed to punish. When not dressed up on Halloween as a knight tilting at racism and the obstuction of true love, when nullification is merely another word for “enforce this law against someone else, please, we’re middle-class,” and when it is crystal clear that nobody is interested in bucking the system, just gaming it, in short, when the scenario resembles reality, is “saving this guy right now” nearly as attractive a choice?
Thank you King. You’ve help me to articulate something that I’ve always felt but have never been able to properly state.
I’ve never heard of any part of the constitution that says the law applies only to “bad” people. It’s a persons actions that break the law, not their character. Therefore, it’s the persons actions that should be the focus of prosecution. An upstanding citizen who grows 12 pot plants is just the same as a scummy lowlife who grows 12 pot plants. And I am very glad that the law works this way.
I can’t agree with this. Did they break the same law? Yes. Are their motivations the same? No.
It’s this type of thinking that makes marijuana remain illegal and upstanding citizens [who happen to smoke pot] seem like demons. They’re not.
No matter what way I look at it, I see a huge difference between the two people you describe. I understand under the letter of the law they committed the same offense. The entire issue is frustrating, and I’m not frustrated with you hypno but with my continued malcontent over this issue.
The justice system doesn’t work that way and you know it. Justice often comes down to the lawyers you can afford ::cough::OJ::cough:: the publicity the case gets ::cough:: OJ & Rodney King ::cough:: and we’re perfectly capable of coming up with things like three strikes rules where the first offense isn’t dealt with nearly as harshly as the third or fourth offense. That’s certainly how it works with drunk driving laws. A first offense is dealt with much less harshly than a second or third offense within seven years.
“Do the crime, do the time,” is highly negotiable.