There is in all of us a strong disposition to believe that anything lawful is also legitimate. This belief is so widespread that many persons have erroneously held that things are “just” because the law makes them so.
--Frederic Bastiat
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I never wanted to sit on a jury until I started to absorb this idea. Even more so when I learned that many convictions are based on the way the State "instructs" a jury, and the jurors don't realize the power in their hands.
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I never wanted to sit on a jury until I started to absorb this idea. Even more so when I learned that many convictions are based on the way the State "instructs" a jury, and the jurors don't realize the power in their hands.
I like the quote from Bastiat and I came to my thinking on jury duty for much the same reasons, although I have never seen the quote until today. Before I was retired I never shriked jury duty after I came to the same conclusions even when all bossess' tried to get you to and would even write up an excuse for you to get out of the duty and to me that is the word operative word "duty". I realized that losing a weeks pay did not make up for letting the guilty go free or the innocent go convicted. The state surely uses jurories ignorance of the law but they also use their own stupididy against them, either by the state or the defense, re: the Simpson Jury and their own judge Judy.
ReplyDeleteIf juries worked the way they were intended to work, the unConstitutional laws and regulations created and enforced by our government would be null and void.
ReplyDeleteI would rather a hundred true criminals go free than one innocent man be convicted. As it stands, however, the State has arranged it so that there are _no_ innocent men. If you accept "law" as being right and just, we are each and every one of us criminals. That is what juries were created to prevent and correct.
Fully informed juries prepared and willing to do their duty would be the most powerful tool we have to correct injustice and tyranny.