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njlauren -> RE: You Are the Jury (4/27/2013 10:54:28 AM)
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This raises a very thorny question, because this is where you come down to arguments of a society bound by rule of law and where the law may not be so effective. The details here are slim, but as presented, I think the woman should be convicted of assault, but I think the penalty for it should consider her motivations for doing what she did. The person beat was breaking the law, he was a drug dealer, it wasn't like she just went on a rampage and hurt innocent people, and it was a mother frustrated (doing the wrong thing), and all that should be taken into consideration. Whether suspended sentence, community service, anger management training as well, the sentencing should take into account what happened. On the other hand, someone should also be asking the local cops why the drug dealer was out there dealing, rather than being put behind bars, too.
I think Jury nullification is a very real thing, and to be honest, I think I could be capable of it. I understand only too well how the rule of law is that thin line between civilization and anarchy (take a look at what happens in places like India where rule of law is often a joke.. a 5 year old is raped and the cops try to bribe the parents with the equivalent of 50 bucks to keep their mouths shut), and anarchy is easy.
But what happens when the law is so fucked up that as a juror you sit there and say what the fuck? For example, in many places they can try someone for sexual assault for consensual S/M, it happened in NYC, where the prosecutor made a motion to suppress any kind of evidence that the 'victim' has consented to it, and the schmuck judge allowed it (primarily e-mails). If I was on a jury and I had reason to believe it was consensual and this was just idiotic law enforced by either religious half wits or 1970's era feminists, you can bet I would vote to not convict, screw what the law said. Part of being on a jury is common sense, and though you are supposed to rule as the law says, based on its terms, when you see the law going against any sense of justice, you are going to vote that way, it is part of the reason we have jury trials, to let peers decide (it doesn't always work to an advantage, jurors can also vote, as they too often do, on prejudice).
I would have a hard time on a trial dealing with vigilantism, even though I know there also are a lot of problems with that, that often innocent people get wrongly taken in, as with the Zimmerman case in Florida, or someone acts stupidly. On the other hand, I also know what it is to live in high crime areas, where drug dealers are operating out in the open, where little kids are being shot at and killed by types who I wouldn't even call animals in crossfire and were called 'mushrooms', and the law basically could do nothing about it. I lived in NYC in a working class neighborhood that was on the fringes of a bad one, this was late 80's/early 90's, and I saw what happens, and if a group of people started taking out the drug dealers in rage over what they were doing to their communities, it would be really hard for me to convict them, knowing that the law basically laughed at the drug dealing, or that the legal system was so stacked in favor of the defendants that they might as well let them go or that people in the community, either out of fear or because they saw the dealers as 'one of them', would not 'rat out' the dealers.
Yet not far from where I lived was an area that was known as one of the safest in the country, it was the kind of place where if older people wanted to be outside and night, they could, or kids could play in the playground and not be worried about drug dealers. The local precinct commander claimed it was great policing, people in the surrounding areas (that were drug and crime riddled) said the place was given special treatment, but the real reason was that word got out that if you went into that area and did something wrong, you better hope the cops got to you before the people did, it was no joke. It wasn't a panacea, as I pointed out earlier that kind of thing is dangerous, it can mean someone who doesn't 'look right' , whether it be race, ethnicity or simply the way they looked, could be harassed, and that isn't right either...but I also understand what it is to see when little kids get gunned down or a 80 year old women mugged for 5 bucks and brutally beaten up, so it would be hard.
And knowing myself, if it were what I thought was a threat against my family, and thought the law would look the other way (and being with a family, and different i.e trans in transition at the time, it was a real threat), I would act if I thought it was all I had. I had a minor case of that, I had written years ago an op ed refuting what some drooling idiot had written about gay people, how they didn't deserve rights and such, and I took some heat for it, at the time my phone number was public. There was one guy that was harassing me, and the cops called it 'harmless' , like yeah, my then 4 year old son picked up the phone and this jackass screaming "your father is a goddam fag lover and is going to hell and burning' and the like, some other incidents with vandalism, and the cops were like "it is just smoke and noise, don't worry' (I guess they didn't consider leaving dead rats in my mailbox or spray painting '666 lover' on the telephone pole on my property wasn't harassment).
I knew who the guy was, and one night a couple of friends of mine paid this holy roller a visit, and told him that if anything like that happened again to myself or my family, he better move to Florida, because he would experience a lot worse, and they got the point across, the guy left me alone, in fact, I hear he stopped harassing others, too, because he was called on his bullying. Yeah, it could be risky, because the law would obviously be more inclined to prosecute myself or my friends for threatening him then him terrorizing my family, but it worked. There was a jerk in my high school that was obsessed with this girl, they had dated and he had treated her like shit, had basically tried to rape her, and then wouldn't take no for an answer, and at the time, back in the late 70's, there wasn't the awareness in the law about stalkers and sexual harrassment there is now (basically, if what happened in Ohio happened in my town in the 70's, as it did, the law would basically say "boys will be boys" and laugh it off). Said girl had a lot of friends, including myself, and we told the jackass if he didn't stop bothering her, that among other things, he would be facing a 5000 dollar repair bill for his car (several of us were skilled mechanics) and worse...and it worked, he left her alone. Prudent course would be to 'let the law handle it', but as was once said in a different context, the law is an ass...... (using it deliberately out of context).
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