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Judge In Pirate Bay Trial Biased
maglo writes "The judge who handed down the harsh sentence to the four accused in the The Pirate Bay trial was biased, writes Sveriges Radio (Sweden Public Radio): sr.se (swedish). Google translation. The judge is member of two copyright lobby organizations, something he shares with several of the prosecutor attorneys (Monique Wadsted, Henrik Pontén and Peter Danowsky). The organizations in question are Svenska Föreningen för Upphovsrätt (SFU) and Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (SFIR)."
If Swedish isn't your native language, this article might prove more useful:
Pirate Bay Judge Accused of Bias
If the allegations are true, they should easily win an appeal... assuming the rest of the judicial system is not so corrupt... allegedly, of course.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
If they knew about the judge before hand. If they did perhaps (in typical TPB fashion) they went through the trial knowing damn well they were going to use this to get out of it
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Clearly, they could not, or did not.
The TPB lawyers didn't do their homework, which is a sentiment that rings very loudly in a lot of commentary about this trial.
It will hopefully come up in the appeal. This may have been a strategy all along -- i.e. let the music industry lawyers put all their cards on the table during the trial, and destroy them in the appeal.
I move for a bad court thingie!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Aren't Judges supposed to remove themselves from a case if there is a known conflict of interest or an arguable bias? Don't they get in trouble for presiding over cases with this bias?
Maybe someone with a background in law can answer this? Google didn't seem to want to give any definitive answers. Then again, maybe the laws in Sweden are different?
Occam's Razor says that they probably do have at least a little bit of bias if they are interested enough to join a group that lobbies the government.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Here's a link to the story in the Wall Street Journal.
Damn. Just who are the pirates in this case?
3 things about computers: they're alive, they're self-aware, and they hate your guts.
Not just a group that lobbies, a group that lobbies together with the prosecution!
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Looks like the Swedish court system is rotten. Next thing you know, couple of judges will open a private juvenile detention facility, rule the government detention facility to be inadequate, harshly punish all juveniles appearing before them to long detentions, send them to their own private detention facility, bill the government for millions of dollars, and whoop it up in some Caribbean island. Nah. The Swedes better look up at the American Judicial System (TM), The Best Justice Money Can Buy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
How is a judge even allowed to belong to such an organization? A judge who does, and who believes what he is doing, will be the definition of activist judge. Judges aren't supposed to have their own agendas. They're there to execute the law and therefore ostensibly the will of the people.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
lawyers/judges are often memebers of many many organisations, it doesn't mean they have the same rabid bias of an apple fanboy of /.
Membership is one thing. The judge is on the board of directors! That's just a wee bit stronger connection than fanboy.
That would be like allowing Steve Jobs preside over MS's trial.
bias or not, I think its interesting that he, possible the only judge in Sweden that is a member of both these organizations got to be the judge in this case.
http://www.intellipool.se/ - Intellipool Network Monitor
Several experts in Sweden are calling for a re-trial with another judge.
It's somewhat embarrassing. The judge says that he made the call that his participation in "intellectual property groups" (upphovsrättsföreningar) did not bias him.
When the trial started a nämndeman (assistant to the judge) was dismissed because he was considered biased due to his profession as a composer.
It sure will be interesting to see how this one plays out. One might assert that the judge made a huge mistake by taking the case and thus wasting a tremendous amount of time and energy for both sides. Rather moronic for a judge, who should be able to see this type of conflicts.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
he joins lots of organisations so he has another piece of paper to hang on the wall.
I bet THAT was heard a lot in Nuremberg 60 years ago.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
bias or not, I think its interesting that he, possible the only judge in Sweden that is a member of both these organizations got to be the judge in this case.
i-n-t-e-r-e-s-t-i-n-g....Hrm, you have a funny way of spelling "corruption"...
Occam's Razor is that the simplest answer is true,
Sorry, but no. Occam's Razor says that the explanation of a phenomena should make as few assumptions as possible. In no way does this translate to "the simplest answer is true" because in many cases the simplest answer isn't true.
The ones with shallower pockets and fewer friends in high places. Obviously.
They may have been unaware of this. More likely, they may have thought that they had compelling arguments and the worst case (i.e. they lost) would have meant that they could get a retrial (and therefore be paid for longer) if they lost. The judge may well not have been very biased. Someone with moderate leanings in one direction can still be persuaded in the other by well-reasoned arguments. If this were the case, they may have won anyway, but knowing that the judge had this bias gave them an additional strategy in case it was not.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...cleared the search warrant towards TPB +3 years ago, I wonder if that was properly handled, from the articles here in sweden it seems he took the warrant-request from APB and just signed it and added "take anything you find interesting" and let them have at it.
Lawyer Peter Althin, representing the Pirate Bay spokesperson Peter Sunde calls for retrial
There have been a series of interesting events surrounding the extended Pirate Bay process. It started with PRQ (the web hotel hosting TPB) being illegally raided, and to add the icing on that cake, the minister in charge acting in violation of the Swedish constitution by directly ordering law enforcement (see New Technology's "Was the Raid a Judicial Scandal?" [in Swedish]). Then the FRA and IPRED bills passed in direct defiance of election promises and popular opinion folding to foreign pressure, as was the trial itself. It is hardly surprising that it turned out that the judge was cherry picked. The judge, Thomas NorstrÃm, argued that "My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest," and he was not swayed in his judgement by involvement with copyright protection groups.
There was great surprise over the April 17th ruling. Even the legal experts that expected a conviction were taken aback by the prison sentence and the size of the compensatory fine.
The current debate on Swedish technical boards is one of conspiracy theories. Swedes are generally relatively hesitant of suggesting conspiracies, but this one reeks of collusion.
The former Chief Prosecutor Sven-Erik Alhem says (in Swedish) that this will hurt the international renown of Swedish courts as well as damage domestic belief in judicial neutrality and safety.
Also interesting is the public statement from the Pirate Party which calls this "Corruption and miscarriage of justice" and "The copyright lobby has really managed to bring corruption to Sweden".
This may turn out to be a huge inconvenience for the copyright organisations and for the ruling coalition.
The prosecution got a guilty verdict without actually managing to prove any wrongdoing due to severe incompetence and lack of knowledge.
It was pretty clear something was odd about the decision, whether the TPB guys were right or wrong is irrelevant when the prosecution are unable to actually prove any wrongdoing.
You can't legitimately get a guilty verdict if you haven't proven that they're guilty of doing something illegal, accusations alone aren't enough.
The interesting thing now will be to see what happens as a result of this revelation. It's probably worth pointing out that this conspiracy almost certainly goes deeper - the first judge due to judge their trial was removed due to conflict of interest IIRC and this is his replacement, so the real question has to be who is responsible for repeatedly ensuring the judges presiding over this case have strong music industry/pro-copyright lobby links? Who in Sweden determines which judge should oversee a particular case?
Its fairly common in sweden that the first instance of the court system (Tingsrätten) is viewed upon as a bunch of clowns you have to pass to get to the real court. They consists of local politicians and if your local ones are anything like ours you know they suck on a professional level in every way possible when it comes to just about anything they do.
Im fairly sure the TPB lawyers has been set for going to the highest level court from the beginning and planned accordingly. This little gem with a clearly biased judge doesnt really help the TPB guys other than for PR since whatever a retrial will result in the trial will be taken higher up in the court system.
Its just a huge PR win for us in the PirateParty and the public opinion. It paints a very clear and vivid picture of us small ones against greedy, corrupt, self-loving, elite and above-the-law politicians.
HTTP/1.1 400
The official term for the others are privateers...
But since Sweden is not a part of the same judicial tradition as the US, this has no bearing on the TPB trial. In Sweden, you are pretty much guaranteed a second trial at a higher level, unless it is a question of a small-time crime (or the case is very simple). This being a high profile trial, making an appeal to the second level was a given, even before the trial started.
If the second level court decides the judge was biased, they will order a re-trial at the first level - which will then be followed be an appeals process. The reason the lawyers may not go through with a re-trial, is that it will only mean another trial that won't add anything of interest. Since this is a very special trial, the Supreme Court may take the case too - or order a re-trial at the second level. So a re-trial at the first level may not be worth it, we were probably looking at 3 or 4 trials anyway.
IANAL, but my cousin is a judge here in Sweden.
Yes, I am a biological organism. All rumors to the contrary are just that, rumors.
Occam's Razor is that the simplest answer is true,
Occam's Razor says that the explanation of a phenomena should make as few assumptions as possible.
Yadda yadda, Occam's Toothbrush says that the simplest definition is true.
You just got troll'd!
Would the purpose of the organizations (SFU and SFIR) factor in, or is it the fact that organizations with a vested interest in tough-on-copyright are members?
If I were the one investigating this, I would be more interested in the membership and the activities than in the expressed purposes, since crooks like to disguise what they do and their expressed purposes are always benign. Like I'm sure the RIAA's expressed purposes do not include 'extortion, using illegal investigators, making false statements of fact in legal documents, collusion, price fixing, suing children and dead people, using economic might and unscrupulous lawyers to attempt to rewrite copyright law by confusing judges, etc.'. If, e.g., this organization has ever lobbied on behalf of copyright owners, the judges' membership -- if not disclosed and consented to -- ought to result in his being disqualified.
Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
Generally, the public you refer to doesn't care one bit about copyright cases or law. Only the corporations and people like Paul McCartney or Elton John (who have a vested interest in keeping new artists out) support stronger copyright laws. There is little division in the public's opinion.
Agreed, this judge should never have been on this case.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
There's no way TPB's lawyers were in the dark about this.
But now, they get to turn this into a(n even bigger) circus and it will be thrown out due to the judge being extremely biased and having worked with the plaintiff before.
Meanwhile, they just managed to get the support of the entire country against the corrupt Judge and local version of the RIAA, and the next Judge will be on best behavior -- and since they haven't done anything illegal, that means they'll get off scott free.
Brilliantly played, Pirates. Brilliantly played.
There is nothing wrong with judges being members of legal organizations.
However, Justice must not only be done, but it must also be _seen_ to be done.
So even if a judge is impartial, he must also appear to most that he is impartial.
Thus a judge should recuse himself from a case if he has "interests" in it, even if he would actually be objective and impartial.
For example, if a judge's relative was being charged for murder, a good judge would not handle the case even if he knew he would be able to be objective and impartial. Because any verdict would be tainted.