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Look at the unconstitutional prosecution of Laura Kriho mentioned on the Fully Informed Jury Association web site.

Look at the unconstitutional prosecution of Laura Kriho mentioned on the Fully Informed Jury Association web site.

That's the way it's supposed to work. The trouble is, in the U.S. judges keep telling juries that they must convict if they think the person broke the law, even if they think the law is stupid. See Fully Informed Jury Assoc.

Fair use isn't an affirmative right, but the Association of Research Libraries timeline says when copyright law was was heavily revised in 1976, fair use became an official defense against infringement charges--though what's allowed and what isn't is only somewhat less vague than when courts were simply disregarding some benign infrinements (which seems ironically similar to jury nullification).

I am not certain of that Sklyarov will have a jury trial but I would think that a jury or a judge would share many of the same guidelines for the determination of guilt. That being the case I would just like to point out this site. which outlines many of the powers that a jury has. Note this fourth bulleted item.

When they believe justice requires it, jurors can refuse to apply the law. Jurors have the power to consider whether the law itself is wrong (including whether it is "unconstitutional"), or is being applied for political reasons. Is the defendant being singled out as "an example" in order to demonstrate government muscle? Were the defendant's constitutional rights violated during the arrest? Much of today's "crime wave" consists of victimless crimes--crimes against the state, or "political crimes", so if you feel that a verdict of guilty would give the government too much power, or help keep a bad law alive, just remember that you can refuse to apply any law that violates your conscience.

By these guidelines I would say a jury (or judge) would be perfectly justified in declaring Dmitry not guilty.

"Jury nullification"...is not so much a legal doctrine...

...other people note that jury nullification was basically how the practice of lynching was legitimized in the South.

It also protected people who assisted escaping slaves under the fugitive slave law and who broke Jim Crow laws. It helped end alcohol prohibition and is protecting many people accused of non-violent crimes of drug possession today.

A juror who's fucked enough in the head to think that lynching is good clean fun is also fucked in the head enough to have no problem in breaking the law to accquit. It's the good citizen who want to respect the law, but finds this particular law not capable of respect, who finds himself in the bind that a Fully Informed Jury Act could resolve.

More people need to know this:

The jury has the right to judge the law.

Quoted from here.

Fully Informed Jury Association's 'Jury Power Page'.
Also, Whitten's _Citizen Rule Book_ has good info on your rights and responsibilites as a juror.

When you sit on a Jury, you have more power than as almost under any other capacity as a citizen, 1000 times more power than when you vote. You have more power than the judge, than the legislators, than the police. You have a right and a duty to judge the facts according to the law, AND TO JUDGE THE LAW ITSELF!

Jury Nullification is when a jury nullifies bad law. A jury can say "not guilty" for ANY reason, especially if the jury thinks the person violated a law, but finds that the law was a bad one.

Research what happened to Edward Bushnell, who sat on the jury of William Penn, accused of practicing an illegal religion.

Also research how Jury Nullification helped eliminate prohibition. (Well, of course I mean *alcohol prohibition*. we still have prohibition today, just a different kind!)
-end quote.

Image what a fully informed jury could do for cases like Pavlovish's, Dmitry's, 2600's, etc, etc.

I don't want to be down on your idea. You're right: jury nullification is exactly the cure to draconian laws, and the Framers agreed. Check out the Fully-Informed Jurors site.

Yep. The black robes have so far removed juries from their duties. Join and support the Fully Informed Jury Association and try and help reverse this trend!

Also, according to a recent California ruling, juries aren't allowed to use their consciences anymore and judge the law. The reason we have (the few remaining shreds of) free speech and freedom of worship is that juries in England and America judged laws against Quaker worship and truthful criticism of government officials as wrong.

The reason there's no Fugitive Slave Act, and the Salem Witch trials failed, and there's no alcohol prohibition all stems from the leadership of the common man -- juries. Not politicians, not 'leaders,' ordinary people like you and me. Unfortunately, judges like to lie about jury power and say that juries DON'T have the rights explained much better than I have at http://www.fija.org/. It's very sad for me and for the future of respect for the law when judges lie, the lie is corrosive and affects far more than one case or thing (although obviously the main target is to continue funding for the tax and spend war on some drugs, if you ask me).
JMR

Speaks ONLY for himself!!! Especially in this message!

Jurors are obligated to find you not guilty of disobeying an unjust law.

It's people like you what cause unrest!

Seriously. You're playing right into their hands. All they have to do is release a convincing-enough-looking report full of charts and numbers and figures and utterly devoid of factual conclusions ("...and signifying nothing"), and people like you eat it right up. I bet 80% of the people who've read that article and have not also read all these comments here (and thus been made to slowly realize the truth) believe every word of it. That's the whole point of FUD: to make people believe lies by disguising them as truth well enough that they don't look like lies.

Here's what needs to happen. Yahoo! (tm) and any other organization that makes "news" reports needs to stop just belching out what someone else has told them is "truth." They have reporters, don't they? Do they report, or are they just mouthpieces for Big Busine$$? There is no opportunity to debate the issue. You get the "news" story, and that's it; "Well, it was on Yahoo!(tm), so it must be true!" People just don't do their own research anymore; they just believe everything they read from places like Yahoo!(tm), CNN(tm), ZD Net(tm), and C|Net(tm) because it would be too much effort to dig into, for example, that "study" and realize what a great steaming fly-infested pile of donkey dung it really is. Most people have never heard of causation, and thus something like "The sun rose today just as I was taking a dump... so the action of flushing the toilet must have made it come up!" still makes sense to them.

What it all comes down to is education. Yes, even septagenarians need to be educated at times. These widely-held beliefs like "Record companies have to pay the artists lots of money; that's why CDs still (STILL!) cost so much" have to be eradicated from the societal archetype, the racial memory that most everyone's belief structure comes from and which gets taught to the children, who teach it to their children, who... etc. You have to look at who benefits from a particular belief to know where to begin correcting it. Here are the facts:

1. The publishing companies pay royalties of perhaps 1% to the artists who created, performed, and recorded their music.
2. They also force the artists to sign away all rights to their own music so the publisher has full control of it.
3. They decide which songs will be released and which will not be.
4. They also decide which songs will receive airtime (radio; remember that?) and how much of it.
5. Songs that they want to be popular will be played 7 times an hour for months on end until it's been so beaten into all impressionable young minds that they can't stop humming or singing it or get it out of their head. Most eventually end up buying the CD in question, usually to hear the other songs on it.
6. Let's say Acme Publishing owns the rights to all songs by the group "Dave." Dave has written some pretty cool songs. What is Acme's strategy? Take one or two of the good songs, mix with 6 or 7 of the bad songs, and make a CD. Then do it again. And again. So instead of one CD that's really worth buying, you get 5 CDs, none of which are worth buying... especially at $20 a pop. Or, they'll release Dave singles CDs, one good song each, and maybe a few with the bad songs too.
7. But they also get to determine which songs are "good," and their definition of "good" is usually "what will the teenagers like?" They get a little focus group of teens, play everything Dave wrote to them, and ask them which ones they'd like to hear again. Those will be the songs they cram down America's throat: MTV, radio, advertising, and all the other tools they use to manipulate our buying decisions.
8. Then they just watch the cash roll in.
9. But along comes MP3s. Napster. IRC. Usenet. An infinity of new distribution channels they don't control and which make them zero money. Why, artists are even able to bypass them completely and produce their own music!! Unheard of!! Preposterous!! It must be stopped!!
10. Enter the FUD Meisters. "Make something up that will get the public on our side," they say. "We must destroy MP3s, or artists will stop signing their lives and souls away to us." And the lies begin.

11. And that's where we stand now. The battle lines have been drawn, the soldiers are preparing, the mud is being slung, the lies are being propagated and believed by the masses of uneducated people who can't be bother to do any original thinking or research of their own into a subject that, frankly, they could care less about. You think the average housewife cares about record companies or MP3s? It doesn't affect them. The tide of public sentiment will never change from the status quo if the majority of people don't care about it. Court judges will continue to back up Big Busine$$, juries will still rule against the Little Guys (utterly forgetting their right of Jury Nullification), and nothing will change because of the golden rule: "He who has the most gold makes the rules."

    What a pitiable species humans are.

In Sweden, cases are decided by a board instead of a jury (except in freedom of press cases) While that system also has its problems it avoids the uncertainity of jury trials.

The procecutor, the judge, maybe even the defence attorney if you're stuck with a public defender, are all working for the government. If I were on trial I'd sure want someone involved in the process to be independant.

Juries exist not only to try the facts of the case, but sometime to try the law as well. (Sadly, this concept has gotten largely lost in recent years.) They are an important check against bad laws.

"The tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots" -Benjamin Franklin

Not to be picky or anything, but that was actually Thomas Jefferson. And he was right... and so are you. When a law is wrong, it MUST be challenged and destroyed; that's why they saw fit to include a little thing known as "Jury Nullification" in the founding laws of this nation. Basically, it means that a jury can find a defendant fully and completely guilty of a violation of law, but refuse to punish him for it because they don't think that law should BE a law. And you will NEVER hear it mentioned in a court of law, on TV, or anywhere except in a few books and movies (and, now, a few websites). Try to guess why. That's right: if We, the Sheeple, knew about it, why, we'd be chopping down laws all over the place! Can't have THAT, now can they? Undermining their hard-fought-for and bought-with-lobbyists laws like that would take away some of Their power, now wouldn't it?

So what better forum to spread knowledge of its existence than right here on good old slashdot?

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

JURY NULLIFICATION

There. Now go do some research on the topic, and shudder with anger when you realize how you've been lied to all these years by judges and lawyers...

The Fully Informed Jury Association's website
Read some more about it
A list of books on the subject
Even more
More
MORE
MORE MORE MORE

As you can see if you read the links above and fully understand them, the power of Jury Nullification is about the only power left to We the People. We don't have enormous wealth, we aren't in positions of political power, we don't have adequate representation in the legislative bodies of the government (meaning, of course, we can't be taxed either, but that's a whole 'nuther post), we don't have a stranglehold on any particular commodity or service (though think what would happen if we all suddenly configured our firewalls and BGP routers to stop letting packets through :)... Jury Nullification was GIVEN to us by the founding fathers because they knew in their wisdom that we would never have as much power as those who are so easily corrupted by it. It Is Our ONLY Weapon Against Them And Their Evil, People!! Do not let it fall by the wayside again. Tell everyone you know about it. Print out all the above webpages I linked to in 48-point Arial and paste them all up and down the streets of your cities. Don't Let THEM Win!!!

Thank you.

> A jury is only there to decide whether or not a
> law was broken.

Not necissarily.

There is a concept known as nullification. It
is the idea that "When a person is on trial for
breaking the law, the law itself is also on trial"

A Jusrys say is (for the most part) the FINAL
word. They are allowd to vote not guilty if the
person did the actions. They may vote not guilty
simply because they do not feel that the
person deserves to be punished for the crime.

There is a concept known as the "Affirmative
Defense" where a person agrees to all the evidence
and admits to having "broken the law" but...argues
that the law is wrong. The jury is allowed (and
have in the past) found people not guilty.

For more information...
Fully Informed Jury
Association

Of course...I don't know that Patents are Criminal
cases...so there may never be an oppertunity
to get it in front of a Jury.

In any case...when the law is wrong, it is right
to break the law. So download early...just in
case.

I think the issue here is not whether or not it IS legal, but whether or not it SHOULD be legal

You have that luxury; you are not on trial for your liberty.

If I were on trial under a bad law here in Maryland, I might well try to point out to the jury that the state constitution declares them "Judges of Law, as well as of fact" and argue why the law is bad.

What the heck did the civil rights movement ever have to do with using a classic definition of "justice"? Use TRUE facts.

During the civil rights movement, there was a purposeful changing of the meaning of the word...

Make that "restoration of the meaning" and I might agree partially. See my earlier posts about the history of the jury system being able to actually achive justice (original sense!!) by acquitting prosecutions against unjust laws. (And also www.fija.org for information about how the current bureaucracy is fighting back against such stuff.)

The notion of law as a pure bureacracy is the revisionist, post-modernist, slashdot-reviled notion. Reviled because it's unjust, unfair, inhumane, illogical.

Laws were always intended to be part of a system of "Justice". But so long as laws can be passed by representatives that have been bought by corporate (and other) special interests, there will be unjust laws. (And yes, the appeals process is one of the processes intended to get rid of them.)

Don't go around asserting that all laws are just; it's provably untrue, always has been.

FYI: Definitions from Webster's:

• Justice (2a) The property of being just, impartial, or fair
• just (2a1) acting or being in conformance with what is morally upright or good; SYN see fair

Though in fairness they also mention the legalistic interpretation, "lawful" -- but it's not a synonym. Fairness and justice have always been firmly coupled. Lawfulness is there to help provide consistency of interpretation.

As it has classicly been defined, justice is when the law is carried out as it is written (or as it is interpreted in a common law derived system.)

Nope. Common law always preserved for Juries the right to acquit in cases brought using un-just laws ... Justice in its classic sense is about fairness. It's the bureacratic "uphold laws as written" notion which is revisionist.

William Penn (yes, founder of Penn's Woods, AKA Pennsylvania) was tried in London for making a Quaker sermon. Jury acquitted, since the law was unjust. (England was in final stages of abolishing the notion of a state Church.)

Alexander Hamilton (you should know that name if you're vaguely literate in the history of the early US) tried a libel case in New York. The journalist (whose name I forget, sorry) was on trial for Libel. He'd published true facts about the King -- all agreed. Prosecution said that "truth is no defense, because truth is even more likely to cause insurrection". Jury said "hey, that's an unjust English Law", acquitted.

Know what you're flaming about. And also go read the Fully Informed Jury Asociation web site before you become a juror. (Not that, as a programmer, you're likely to be on a Jury. People who think for a living are rarely empaneled; on both sides of the case, lawyers want someone who's used to believing what they're told. So much for an "impartial jury of peers".)

The core problem is that the US legal system is unjust. It's enforcing unjust laws, and is no longer serving its original role of letting them be rejected before they do much damage. Only professional legalist bureacrats are now permitted to make such decisions ... and you know that it takes years (often a decade) to appeal. Not a "prompt" of "fair" system.

... is that the legal system isn't about justice or fairness. That's a common misapprehension on the part of most non-lawyers, and including most techies. Heck, it's a shock to many first-year law students too.

Now there's an issue: Should the legal system be about justice and fairness?

I tend to say yes. And in fact, in Common Law (evolved since the English Magna Carta, and the original basis of US law) had a much stronger emphasis on justice. Particularly after they finally got rid of King and Church as being above the law. (Gee, those were significant issues in the US revolution too!)

As a pointed example, in the US many juries are instructed by judges that their job is only to evaluate facts. Whereas the founders of this country, and everyone else at the time of the American Revolution, understood that an "impartial jury" was also intended to protect against governmental abuses including passage of unjust laws. Check out the history. Did you ever wonder why jurors may only be registered voters? It's because voters have two kinds of votes: for representatives in elections, and for justice in court cases. Yes, that's a plug for the Fully Informed Jury Asociation. Read that site BEFORE you need to act as a juror, and of course make your own decisions.

That's only one example; there are many others, and surely there's one you'll believe even if you don't like the notion that the checks'n'balances against the US government include direct action by the citizenry, not just (as you were likely taught in school, by government-approved texts) (a) elections (choice between wings of the republicrat party), (b) representatives (who have long been more beholden to corporate interests than to voters, and note the poor choices most of us get due to the republicrat oligarchy), (c) other parts of the government (rather circular, that is!), (d) suing the government ("You can't fight City Hall"), and of course (e) violent overthrow of corrupt regimes (the option the founders were forced to use, and which is explicitly preserved in the Bill Of Rights).

Point being: in the US today, the legal system is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy which is fleeing not only its roots, but the remaining remnants of justice. It denies that justice is the intent of law, and enforces law not justice.

It's no wonder that members of professions that pride themselves on logic ("techies", in a broad way) don't much understand lawyers. No different from most citizens.

Yeah, but I wouldn't really call drug users an organized group. It's not like they're staging "national grow some dope" days or anything.

And, yes, it is difficult to get people to take action when they're basically happy, and not willing to give up anything short-term to gain something long term. But, they're basically happy, after all...

But another problem is, they're uninformed. Even juries are usually uninformed. Typically, courts try to keep juries from knowing that they are the law, practically speaking. Juries can legally strike down laws rather than either convict or free the defendant. Most times, the judge does not include that in the instructions to the jury. Samuel Chase, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and supreme Court Justice, (1796-1804?) said: "The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts." Look here for more info on that.

The problem is a citizenry uninterested in protecting its own freedoms reminds me of what Heinlein said about the draft: "countries which require a draft to defend themselves deserve to perish" -- or some such. I can't find the actual quote at the moment. Here's a zinger from Sam Adams, though:

"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."

If you're intersted in areading a lot of pro-liberty maxims and aphorisms, look here.

Anonymous (Canadian) Coward (wishing we had an equivalent here in the GWN).

It is not common practice in the courts to inform juries of this. For more information, see the http://Fully Informed Jury Association.

Tell your friends!

Unfortunately, that's the way it is most of the time. To really extract yourself without lots of problems takes more work than most people care to put forth. As legislation is not likely to go through on this issue, the next best thing is to inform juries of their right to decide law as well as fact, so that people who are scared of not filing can stop being. Too bad the Supreme Court ruled that judges are no longer required to inform juries of this right, even though it still exists. The gubbmint just had too many problems with juries overriding their laws.

Fully Informed Jury Association

One of the oldest principles of law is that the law must be written down, and made public. This serves two purposes: it prevents authority figures from making up arbitrary laws as they go along, and allows citizens to know what the law is.

Are current laws are so amazingly complex (though almost always unnecessary) and so full of legalese, that what the law means basically depends on whatever the authority figure says it is at the time they wish to apply it -- thus, by having enough laws, and interpreting those laws as they see fit, our legal system currently violates this oldest and most important of legal principles.

Another important element of English common law, the legal system that is arguably the best that has ever existed, is that the common man generally does a pretty good job of deciding issues of law. This is at the root of the idea of trial by jury. This concept is also suffering erosion at present. See the Fully Informed Jury Association.

Alan R. Light