When the jurors who last week convicted medical-marijuana cultivator Ed
Rosenthal later expressed disgust with their own ruling, I actually
yelled at my computer: "Well then why didn't you take Nancy Reagan's
advice and just say no?"

The trial was a joke from the start. Because Rosenthal was being tried
under federal law, not California's, the judge forbade any discussion
of the Golden State's medical marijuana statute or the fact that
Rosenthal was growing the pot with the special sanction of the city of
Oakland. As a result, the jury was not allowed to consider any such
information.

With no possible defense left, Rosenthal's attorney, Robert Eye, made
what the Sacramento Bee called "a thinly veiled plea for jury
nullification."

"Please do justice," he said. "We don't ask you to check your common
sense of justice at the door when you judge this case. I can only hope
there are those of you whose sense of justice …"

Jumping on Eye, the judge interrupted and told the jury, "It's not your
determination whether a law is just or unjust. That can't be your
task." Going further, according to jurywoman Marney Craig, the judge
instructed, "You cannot substitute your sense of justice … for your
duty to follow the law."

The judge is wrong.

"If the jury feels the law is unjust," according to the Fourth Circuit
in the 1969 case U.S. v. Moylan, "we recognize the undisputed power of
the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given
by a judge, and contrary to the evidence. … If the jury feels that the
law under which the defendant is accused is unjust … the jury has the
power to acquit …" (emphasis added).

Some buck at the notion of jury nullification. They see it as going
against the rule of law – a dozen anarchists passing judgment on a
whim. Endowed with such power and the guilty will walk free because a
chili onion supreme didn't sit well in the stomach of the jury foreman.


Perhaps – but the founders didn't see it that way.

"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man,
by which a government can be held to the principles of its
constitution," said Thomas Jefferson in a 1789 letter to Thomas Paine.
His comments presuppose laws which go above and beyond the national
charter (such as drug prohibition today) and the jury's vital role in
seeing that no citizens are harmed by such tyrannical legislation.

John Adams, the second American president, sang from the same hymnal.
"It is not only [the juror's] right, but his duty," he said in 1771,
"to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment,
and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the
court."

Likewise, in an 1804 libel case, Alexander Hamilton argued that "the
jury have an undoubted right to give a general verdict, which decides
both law and fact."

"This distribution of power, by which the court and jury mutually
assist, and mutually check each other," Hamilton continued, "seems to
be the safest, and consequently the wisest arrangement, in respect to
the trial of crimes. ... To judge accurately of motives and intentions,
does not require a master's skill in the science of law. It depends
more on a knowledge of the passions, and of the springs of human
action, and may be the lot of ordinary experience and sagacity."

In other words, the people are deemed sensible enough to decide when
one of their fellows is getting the shaft from an unjust law. This only
makes sense. The people are judged sensible enough to elect legislators
in the first place. If things go awry after the ballot box, the jury
box provides one more place to check and stop the progress of tyranny
by nullifying bad laws passed by those legislators.

Far from viewing nullification as a gateway to random enforcement of
law and anarchy, the founders viewed it as an essential tool for
combating despotism and preserving liberty – one more method of denying
absolute power to any single man or governing body.

What is so striking about nullification and the Rosenthal case in
particular is how applicable the reasoning of the founders proves to
be. The law violated the consciences of the jurors and was
unconstitutional, to boot.

"There is no such thing as medical marijuana," DEA spokesman Richard
Meyer told the Associated Press. "We're Americans first, Californians
second."

In terms of the law, that is unmitigated bull.

The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government no power to prohibit
pot. Article 1, Section 8, provides congressional marching orders on
many tasks – banning weed is not one of them. Neither is skirting the
10th Amendment, which specifically holds the duties of the government
to what the Constitution permits; all else is the business of the
states alone.

Such is the case with California's medpot law, Prop. 215, which permits
precisely what Rosenthal was doing.

By nullifying, the jury would have been fulfilling Jefferson's
perceived role of the jury, holding the government to "the principles
of its constitution."

It's too bad the judge lied to the jury before it found Rosenthal
guilty. Had they known better, the jurors may have felt free to follow
their own conscience and sense of justice and thus spared an innocent
man from a travesty.

Find out more about the rights and duties of juries at Fully Informed
Jury Association -- http://www.fija.org/

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Joel Miller is managing editor of WND Books. Additionally, he runs his
own publishing house, Oakdown.

Juries: Just Say No
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=30946

Source: WorldNetDaily (US Web)
Author: Joel Miller
Published: February 8, 2003
Contact: letters@...
Website: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/
Mirror: http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread15416.shtml

Related ...

Ed Rosenthal's Trial Pictures & Articles
http://freedomtoexhale.com/trialpics.htm
Pot Jury Rebellion - Salon.com
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15413.shtml
Jury Rigging -- Jacob Sullun
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15401.shtml
Misguided Marijuana War - New York Times
http://cannabisnews.com/news/thread15365.shtml

"We the People are the rightful master of both congress and the courts
- not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who
pervert the Constitution."
Abraham Lincoln

Our American Common Law
http://www.svpvril.com/OACL.html
Fully Informed Jury Association
http://www.fija.org/
How FIJA Saved My Life!
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/jsmill/fija1293.htm
Erowid Freedom Vault : Jury Nullification
http://www.erowid.org/freedom/jury_nullification/jury_nullification.shtml
Jury Nullification
http://www.cannabinoid.com/wwwboard/politics/binaries/27/27624.gif

Schaffer Library of Drug Policy
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer
Trial by jury — Cato Institute
http://www.cato.org/dailys/12-09-98.html
In Jury Rooms, Form of Civil Protest Grows — Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/jury080299.htm
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n472.a03.html
Candidate is after jurors, not voters! ----The Philadelphia Inquirer
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99/n1168/a07.html
Anti-government sentiment may affect trials — AP in Lubbock Online
http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/040797/anti.htm
Fully Informed Jury Association
http://www.fija.org/
An Essay on the Trial by Jury — Lysander Spooner
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/7394/lysander.html
Juror Dismissed “For Handing Out Constitutional Propaganda”
http://toogoodreports.com/column/general/suprynowicz/042301.htm

Robert Anton Wilson On the hotly-debated question of jury
nullification, I will not offer my own arguments this time (I have done
that often) but will quote some authorities far more learned in
Anglo-American law than I am. To wit:
http://www.rawilson.com/prethought.html

Every jury in the land is tampered with and falsely instructed by the
judge when it is told that it must accept as the law that which has
been given to them, or that they can decide only the facts of the case.

-- Lord Denham, O'Connell v Rex (1884)

The jury has the power to bring in a verdict in the teeth of both the
law and the facts.
-- Justice Holmes, Homing v District of Columbia, 138 (1920)

If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states then that
juror has accepted the exercize of absolute authority of a government
employee and has surrendered a power and a right that once was the
citizen's safeguard of liberty.
-- Bancroft, History of the Constitution

If the jury feels the law is unjust, we recognize the undisputed power
of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as
given by a judge, and contrary to the evidence.
-- 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, US v Moylan, 1969

When a jury acquits a defendent even though he or she clearly appears
to be guilty, the acquittal conveys significant information about
community attitudes and provides a guideline for future prosecutorial
discretion...Because of the high acquittal rate in prohibition cases in
the 1920s and early 1930s, prohibition laws could not be enforced. The
repeal of these laws is traceable to the refusal of juries to convict
those accused of alcohol traffic.
-- Sheflin and Van Dyke, Law and Contemorary Problems, 43, No. 4, 1980

Prison Industrial Complex
What is the most profitable industry in America? Weapons, oil and
computer technology all offer high rates of return, but there is
probably no sector of the economy so abloom with money as the privately
run prison industry.
http://www.corpwatch.org/search/PSR.jsp
Stop Prison Rape
http://www.spr.org
The Prison Industry: Capitalist Punishment
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=853
Wackenhut's Free Market in Human Misery
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=868
America's Private Gulag
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=867
The Real Price of Prisons
http://www.motherjones.com/prisons
MAKING THE WALLS TRANSPARENT
http://www.angelfire.com/fl3/starke

Anglo-Saxon common law right of claiming a "necessity" to break the
law, because doing so prevented a greater harm.
Rob Waddell

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyers Kangeroo Krunch
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/culture/media/4/4204.jpg
Opinion
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/culture/media/4/4199.gif
Jefferson V Waldo
http://boards.marihemp.com/boards/culture/media/4/42
Judge Harlan Stone
http://www.cannabinoid.com/wwwboard/politics/binaries/27/27185.gif
00.gif
Can't Find It
http://www.cannabinoid.com/boards/politics/media/36/36609.gif


=====
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Hardrug, Booze & Petro-Chem Alternative
Eliminated by Legislation and Administrated Education Depravation!
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