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

[Brian Loe]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 2:54 AM, Alan Light <alanlight at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

The part of what you wrote that you're not mentioning, however, is
that you think they should be able to do it even if the judge is going
to throw it out. My only objection is that you'd allow the judge to
throw it out even though you'd allow it to be said. In my mind, there
are arguments the prosecutor might want to mention that he knows the
judge will throw out - I'd rather he not be allowed to mention it.

We have an adversarial system in this country - what you allow one
side to do you must allow the other side to do. So if the defense gets
to ignore the judge, so does the prosecutor. Again, once it's been
told to the jury you can NOT erase it from their minds.


> 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?

People are idiots. I only trust persons.


> 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.
>

And that is where a fully informed jury comes in. A fully informed
jury isn't one that knows all of the defense or prosecutor's dirty
little secrets - its one that knows and understands that it is
invested with the power to strike down an unjust and illegal law. As I
believe Jefferson said, if it is not Constitutional it is not a law.
The jury rules on the law as well as the accused person's guilt. In
fact, it should rule on the legality of the law first!

FIJA is also a great way to avoid jury duty - they'll immediately
throw you out of the pool if you even mention it.