Three Cheers for Jury Nullification

Every once in awhile, Time Magazine really surprises me. Usually it’s a bastion of conformity and inside-the-box thinking, but then out of nowhere, pow! Take this week’s surprising guest editorial, from the creators of HBO’s The Wire. Not only do they call out the drug war as the monstrous, destructive atrocity that it is, but they up the ante by calling for good old-fashioned (but unheard of in the MSM) jury nullification:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun’s manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.

Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.

I’ve been a jury rights advocate for years. If you do nothing else to restore freedom in our country, it is essential that you let every person you know — especially when they are about to serve jury duty — that they have the absolute right and duty to just the law itself, as well as the facts of the case, regardless of any instructions to the contrary by the guy in the black dress. The Fully Informed Jury Association is a great resource for spreading the word.

And, as luck would have it, I have jury duty coming up in three weeks. You’d better believe that every potential juror in the waiting room with me will get the new FIJA brochure.

Hat tip: LewRockwell.com

An Inconvenient Silence

March 5, 2008

Over 400 scientists, meteorologists, and climatologists gathered this week for the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City. However, not much more than a couple dozen journalists attended, with even fewer news outlets covering the event. And the reason wasn’t yet another Super Tuesday presidential primary.

Aside from this winter being one of the coldest in modern history, these are the politically incorrect scientists who insist the debate isn’t over on global warming. The ones who still infuse the necessary skepticism before deciding a hypothesis, particularly one based on computer models, becomes a scientific fact. One would figure the media would’ve had a field day uncovering their inaccuracies, lambasting their biases, and questioning their doubts, nowadays tantamount to holocaust denial. But this time, they were let off easy. They were practically ignored.

Who are these scientists anyway? Corporate shills on big oil’s payroll who dismiss the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report without giving it a complete read? Hardly. They are some of the very scientists who not only helped write the IPCC reports, but were discredited and ridiculed for speaking out against their findings being misrepresented for political agendas. Scientists such as Paul Reiter from the World Health Organization, Robert Carter from the Marine Geophysical Laboratory in Australia, as well as John Coleman the founder of the Weather Channel, were among those voicing these concerns along with the thirty some odd errors behind Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and the unfounded alarmism the film has caused.

Given all the new data that is being constantly discovered by scientists such as John Christy, one of the original authors of the IPCC, many are realizing that carbon dioxide is far from the cause of global warming. Despite the heralded “hockey stick” graph, upon closer inspection CO2 does NOT precede rises in global temperature, but instead follows them. Also, CO2 makes up less than 5% of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Water vapor actually accounts for over 95%. It’s only a matter of time until someone in DC or the UN figures out how to calculate its commensurate tax.

And with world leaders such as Václav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, who knows all too well about authoritarian political gambits after living under the Soviet bloc in former Czechoslovakia, a whole other truth may soon become more apparent. Klaus spoke at the conference about his concern with the familiar silencing of freedom of expression by environmentalists who insist the debate is over. Freedoms which are becoming more and more inconvenient than the truth itself.

Iran: Do you really know what you are talking about?

Since Hillary Clinton and John McCain are both well-established Iran-baiters it might be a good idea for the rational humans among us to develop our thinking on Iran based on actual knowledge and understanding of the facts.  Somebody has to do it and in keeping with tradition the major party candidates are not up to the task.

So where should we look to understand the Iranian “problem” better. 

In the book department Scott Ritter, the former Iraq nuclear inspection chief, has written  Target Iran, which  reviews Iran’s nuclear program from the perspective of someone with first hand knowledge of the subject.  In All the Shah’s Men, Steven Kinzer details the CIA sponsored coup that ended democracy in Iran in 1952 and replaced it with the brutal Shah of Iran.

More recently,Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council has written Treacherous Alliance. This book describes the tangeled relationship among the US, Iran and Israel. Dr. Parsi was born in Iran, grew up in Sweden and earned his Doctorate at John Hopkins under (among others) Francis Fukuyama and Zbigniew Brzezinski. I’d say that’s a pretty interesting and useful perspective to balance against that of two of our least favorite Senators.

The NIAC has also just launched a brand new blog. I suspect this will be an invaluable source of information and analysis that won’t appear in the mainstream media as well as a great place to make your comments and hopefully enrich the debate in a positive way. I doubt you will have that opportunity on Fox News.

The Nanny State Reaches Its Apex

It’s finally come to this. They’ve outlawed guns, banned smoking, criminalized fatty foods. You’d think New York’s nanny statists had done just about everything possible to protect grownups from themselves, right? I mean, what else could they do — make it illegal to jump off a tall building?

Well, yes.

Councilmember Peter Vallone Jr. (who else) continues his quest to be New York’s #1 all-around wet blanket — remember his war on art supplies? – by introducing a bill essentially outlawing daredevils. Specifically, his bill would prohibit climbing and jumping off any structure taller than 25 feet.

Vallone claims he is trying to “protect citizens from being landed on,” but that of course is pure unadulterated baloney. Vallone is a garden-variety spoilsport and bully, the sort of neo-puritan who is afflicted with, as Mencken put it, “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

Or as my friend Ernie Hancock likes to put it, “There are two kinds of people in the world, those who just want to be left alone and those who won’t leave them alone.” Vallone is the epitome of the latter.