[debate] [Debate] Legality of defending oneself in a court of law

[Alan Light]

I wrote:
>> I am wondering what justification there can possibly be for
>>not allowing a defendant to defend themself in a court of law. . . .

Brian Loe wrote:
>Pretty simple. If you let the person make the argument,
>an argument that you know will be thrown out, you've let him
>poison the jury's minds. The judge can rule that you're not
>to consider the argument but that doesn't erase the fact
>from the jury's minds.

Brian's subsequent mention of fully informed juries suggests to me that he also has a hard time believing this.  Preventing a defendant from giving any defense they feel will help is, no matter how you word it, an end run around the purpose of a jury trial.  It is one thing as a juror to know or not know that one does not actually have to abide by the judge's directions, it is something else entirely when, as a juror, one is not even allowed to hear all the evidence in the case, to determine the usefulness thereof for oneself.

I know that there have traditionally been problems with racism and sexism, where white juries have found white defendants innocent of crimes against a black victim that were very well documented and known, or of rapists getting freed on the argument that "she was asking for it" and introducing evidence of the victim's dress or past behavior that were NOT relevant to whether the victim gave consent.  All the same, the idea of a jury trial is that a JURY OF PEERS was to try that evidence, not a judge who is further removed from day-to-day reality, and if we cannot trust ordinary people to want to remove criminal activity from their own neighborhoods, then who CAN be trusted to do so?

Besides, at least in the instance of sexism, there is at least as much a problem with the current American legal culture of ruling evidence inadmissable even when it is clearly relevant - such as the case at Duke University a couple years ago when the prosecutor Nifong went off the rails, presuming that the complainant's past history of drug abuse, mental illness, and false allegations against other men were of no consequence.

In any case, the Anglo-American legal system has been formed as a result of trying to correct the many, various problems it has run into over the centuries - problems where the courts made judgments that we all know were incredibly unjust.  Some of those corrections have themselves led to new problems, often new problems that outlive the usefulness of the correction (as cultural changes, for instance, resolve many issues of bigotry and prejudice on their own).  The recent medical marijuana cases, in which the federal government relies on laws that are clearly illegal to ordinary Americans (but valid in the courts), to prosecute defendants for actions that had been clearly allowed by their respective states, without even allowing the jurors to hear incredibly relevant testimony, certainly demand another change to our legal system in favor of defendants.  But perhaps the only change needed is to allow juries to perform as they were intended.

On the other hand, all is not lost.  Such obvious injustices may be exactly what is needed to force cultural changes that end even greater injustices, such as the Drug War.



Alan


      
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