… from jury duty, that it. I’m going to have a lot to say about the experience and lessons learned in an article for the next print edition of Serf City. For now, it suffices to say that it sucked big time, and I’m glad it’s over.
As Vin Suprynowicz wrote, voire dire is French for jury-stacking. I’m experiencing that process first-hand right now. We’ll see what happens.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have jury duty starting today. I’ll post periodically throughout the day if anything interesting happens — hopefully without saying anything that will get me arrested.
Thankfully I’m in the New York County criminal court section, so I might get an interesting case, not the lame civil court section.
Things got off to an inauspicious start this morning. As promised, I printed up a stack of juror rights brochures from the Fully Informed Jury Association and discreetly left them on a table with official court literature in the waiting room. Twenty minutes later, a court officer noticed the brochures and confiscated them. Oh well.
Interesting that they mentioned New York’s famous John Peter Zenger trial in the juror orientation video. The narrator (the late Ed Bradley, I think) mentioned that the jury was ordered to find Zenger guilty but refused. Odd that they’ll mention that, but they won’t connect the dots to inform jurors they have the long-standing right and duty to judge the law itself, as well as the facts of the case, regardless of any judge’s instructions to the contrary.
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
And the City’s politicians and bureaucrats just like him better. And why shouldn’t they - he’s providing tax revenue that helps pay for their salaries and their pensions. Of course so does your tax money - but you have no choice and Bruce Ratner does. Don’t like it? Who cares? You are just an ordinary citizen. Bruce has friend’s in the government.
Eminent Domain is no longer about replacing slums with hospitals (if it ever was). Admit it - It’ s now just the latest trick politicians use to feed their unquenchable thirst for more money and more power over every aspect of your life.
Michael White has a great piece “Columbia Pulls a Kelo”in yesterday’s New York Sun (online version) that points out how there is money to be made in the business of seizing what you thought was your property.
A few actually seem to believe the process is moral or productive. Mayor Bloomberg once commented that potential federal limits on eminent domain would limit NYC’s ability to control it’s own future. Our mayor seemed to miss the point that eminent domain rather limits property owner’s ability to control their futures. Our mayor is famous for thinking he knows best how we all should live.
But even good soldiers in the war against personal freedom seem to admit that the process by which government seizes people’s homes and businesses is flawed at best. In August, Supreme Court Justice Stevens lamented his Kelo position saying that “the free play of market forces is more likely to produce acceptable results in the long run than the best-intentioned plans of public officials.” DUH! Deputy Mayor for Economic Development Dan Doctoroff - the guy that said the free market and the interests of the city were incompatible - has now admitted that he never should have agreed to let Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project ignore the City’s ULURP process. OOPS - None Killed. A few people lost their homes but who’s counting? We have to assume the government knows best right? If they don’t like the law - they can just get the Supreme Court to “clarify” it or ignore it altogether.
It almost looks as if they aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. They will take your home or your business - because they can. Big government costs big money. Somebody has to sacrifice. And you can bet it won’t be Bruce Ratner, or the New York Times, or Columbia or Michael Bloomberg or Dan Doctoroff.
It seems Robert Bork somehow forgot that he’s not as physically agile as he used to be, so now he’s suing the Yale Club for allowing the judge to hurt himself. According to the New York Post:
The 80-year-old legal scholar is suing the Yale Club after he fell off a raised platform as he prepared to deliver a speech on June 6, 2006, hitting his head and suffering injuries to his leg that required surgery.
“Because of the unreasonable height of the dais, without stairs or a handrail, Mr. Bork fell backwards . . . striking his left leg on the side of the dais and striking his head on a heat register,” states the lawsuit, filed yesterday in Manhattan federal court.
Okay, so let’s say the dais was “unreasonably” high. (One-and-a-half feet? Two feet?) Unless justice is literally blind, Bork should have been able to see that for himself before he attempted the arduous climb. He should also have seen that there were no stairs or handrail. If such a feat as mounting the dais was beyond his physical capacity (and apparently it was), he should have refused to try, or asked for assistance.
Isn’t this just the sort of frivolous lawsuit — the kind that shows utter disdain for the notion of personal responsibility — that a Judge Bork was expected to summarily dismiss, if his Supreme Court nomination had been approved?
