That sounds perfect. I don't suppose you have any idea where one might get one's hands on RFID tags and scanners in bulk? I think one'd have to scan every book's bar code to add it to the database, pair that with an RFID tag and then attach it.
I wonder if it'd be possible to triangulate the tags so you can keep track of the books as they move around without trouble?
I have about ~7500 books at home (I have approximately 750 in my home office at the moment) and I know people always want to borrow books. If I had a way to track them, I'd be much happier to lend them out, but of course the article is slashdotted.
What I used to do was create a database as they went out- put in the ISBN, date, time, author, title, etc, etc, etc, and the lendee. Worked pretty well, and I slowly built up the database book by book.
There's a difference between saying "I think copyright is being used unreasonably" and "Copyright law is a great evil in society".
It's also fairly ridiculous to claim that copyright needs to just up and disappear. Aside from its long-held presence in the common law, it's also good logical sense and enshrined in legal codes around the globe.
See, one of the lovely things about copyright law is that the author of the work gets to decide what to do with it. If they feel like their work should be distributed to whomever, whenever, however, they can certainly decide that.
There are other people who do not want that. By obliterating copyright, you remove their rights.
Nobody is forced against their will to charge money for people to view or redistribute their work. The site you quote does not appear to even consider these issues in the most cursory manner.
There is an argument to be made that copyright is too long. On the other hand, there's the opposite argument that copyright should be eternal and instead the definition for derivative works should be loosened slightly.
As a writer myself, I favor copyright. If at any time I wish to allow my works to be distributed freely in their entirety, I can do that. If I wish it to happen on my death, I can write that into my will. But why should you decide what I may or may not do with my writings?
In fact, most current copyright laws contain exceptions to make reasonable derivative copies, and further, basic themes aren't subject to copyright anyway.
However, I cannot in any respect see how copyright law is evil. It may be unenforceable; it may be unreasonable, even. Neither of those equates with evil.
I think, while your comment has some merit, the reasoning behind it is not necessarily sound. Yes, a lot of asian kids do very well in school (and I agree with your comments about how this tends to regress over generations immersed in a different culture), but it is interesting to note where they excel.
The areas where they excel are areas where rote learning and repetitive memorization prove effective at quickly and accurately regurgitate information, because that is, in most cases, the most effective way to study.
The difficulty is, of course, that quickly and accurately regurgitating facts is essentially a pointless activity, unless you spend your life writing exams for a living. I don't remember exactly when the Magna Carta was introduced (1214?) but ten seconds of research quickly brings me the exact date. Repeat ad nauseum for any of an immense variety of specific facts.
Rather, the ability to quickly sift through large quantities of data for relevant pieces of information to the issue is far more efficient. The exact same data-processing techniques are effective regardless of applied field, and you can replace decades of rote memorization of facts with a few hours of data-processing ability.
What ends up happening is that 'intelligence' these days is not so much a matter of innate talent; nor is it a matter of being able to do anything in specific. It's not really even a matter of work ethic. What it is is a matter of curiosity, the willingness to try and fail, and the ability to quickly and accurately sift through input and discern what is important and relevant to the issue at hand.
These are all skills that can be taught. But to say success is merely a matter of effort is a ridiculous oversimplification. There are plenty of cases where hard work will get you nowhere, and success is merely a matter of being able to place yourself in the right place at the right time with the right tools.
Hard work alone will make you at best slightly better than mediocre, in my opinion.
Harvard's lawyers already work for them. They're called professors.:P
That said, I imagine they'd just toss an injunction at them and let that be that. If they get the injunction, so be it; if they don't... well, so be it.
B) And that's just fine. However, by ruling that the message was not a business message but a personal message, presumably these rules did not apply.
C) And it will not. If you believe that justice has not been served, you (Well, the plaintiff, really) is free to exercise his right to appeal this case to an apellate court.
While I find the judge's decision to be flawed, I find the logical principles it appears to be based upon to be essentially sound.
If I were the judge, my reasoning would go something like this:
Plaintiff has not proven that the e-mail is a bulk e-mail.
It is an unreasonable infringement upon the first amendment rights of the defendant to claim that individuals acting in an individual capacity are not within their rights to send e-mails with a misleading subject line if they so feel like it.
The e-mail appears to be a personal e-mail, and is hence not covered under the variety of statutes that cover personal mail.
As a result, Plaintiff has no case, other than perhaps harassment or similar.
Now, I believe that the judge erred in concluding that the message is personal, but I must also come to the conclusion that this is mostly the plaintiff's fault, as the plaintiff appears to have failed to attempt to prove otherwise, and the defendant's message seems, on the surface, to be relatively personal.
While the judge's judgment may have been flawed, it is not so deeply and obviously flawed that it is worth a disciplinary offense, and it's not particularly stupid, either. That doesn't change the fact that I think it's wrong.
If the plaintiff thinks it's wrong, well, he has plenty of options. Instead of exercising them, however, he whines on slashdot, which says a lot about his actual necessity of using the court system for what he's doing.
I'm sure the Court of Appeal would enjoy laughing you out of the courtroom, but if he's really that dedicated, he could certainly appeal to them and they would consider whether or not the judge made an error on the face of the law.
Of course, this would get him nowhere, because even if he won, the fifty thousand dollars he spent appealing he's not going to get back.
Secondly, there are three things here that people, I think, are misunderstanding.
A) The judge is not obligated to do your fact-finding for you. If you are claiming that the e-mail was a bulk e-mail, prove it. If you are claiming that the e-mail was sent by an automated program, prove it. It's not up to the judge to pore through e-mail headers to decide what's important, and most judges would probably not know how anyway.
B) There is probably a specific legal definition of what 'spam' is, and the likelihood of it magically happening to perfectly dovetail with the general Slashdot opinion is vanishingly small.
C) This is small claims court. Small claims court is, in general, relatively lax compared to any superior or appellate court. Given the number and the types of cases they hear, this is not unexpected. If you want your case to receive the attention you believe it deserves, file a full lawsuit and get a lawyer.
At which point Congress turns around and impeaches him, and THEN starts issuing citations again. If Cheney starts pulling the same, they impeach him, too.
And yet, you seem to forget that she brought this upon herself. In many ways, it is likely that the judgment brought against her was punitive. She wasted the court's time; she brought no particularly appropriate evidence on her own behalf, and she was given opportunity by the plaintiff to settle. Instead, she chose to go ahead with a court-case that she was almost certain to lose.
And now she (and you) are complaining that the judgment isn't what you want? Well, no shit it's not. You had plenty of other options, and yet you took one that was almost undoubtedly going to end up the worst off for you. A good lawyer, knowing she was guilty and realizing that getting her off would be very hard, if not impossible, would have told her to settle and that'd be it.
Instead, she didn't settle, and they made an example out of her. I can't say I'm particularly sorry- while the RIAA's lawyers tend to often run up against the line of professional responsibility and in some cases breach it, that's not really relevant here.
Imagine you, a random joe making $50,000 a year, goes out and hijacks an oil-tanker carrying $120,000,000 worth of refined gasoline. You run it up against a reef and spill it everywhere. So Exxon-Mobil takes you to civil court and extracts a judgment of $150,000,000 from you. Is that somehow unfair because you're unable to pay it? Your life would be destroyed (not to mention the next twenty years you'll probably spend in jail).
The fact is, you knew what you were doing was illegal when you did it, and you judged the risks acceptable. Now you're complaining because those risks have come around to hit you in the ass again? You can't disclaim responsibility like that.
I meant 'issues of fundamental fairness' in a legal/procedural sense, not a moral one. The two are not the same or even very similar, and your average layman doesn't understand the difference.
Firstly, you are not supposed to be judged on the law 'as it is commonly understood', so that argument is moot.
Secondly, I did not claim the law was too complicated for juries to interpret. I just said they weren't the best at it, and since we already have a profession of people to do that, (lawyers), why are we using random laypeople when we already have a class of technical specialists who are much better at it? It's foolish. Also, the fact the law isn't particularly complicated doesn't mean anyone can follow it. Hell, most people don't. Simplicity in text is very different from application in practice and execution.
So you support a rigid enforcement of even immoral actions carried out under the guise of enforcement of the law? Totalitarian and corrupt governments love spineless yes men: they make day to day operations of the machines of injustice operating under the *name* of "justice" so much easier.
Morality is entirely relative. The law is supposed to be a cogent summary of civilizational ethics with a drab of ideology added to the top. There are plenty of things I consider inherently immoral- (the law against murder, to take a random example- but that does not mean that I will nullify any murder cases when I sit on a jury. As a juror, your job is to find a verdict on the facts and the law.
As a citizen, your job is to change the law via democracy if you don't like it. The two duties are entirely separate.
Only if by "justice" you mean "obey the law because it is the law". Setting aside the current issue of file sharing, if you can stand up and proclaim a person "guilty" of committing some crime for which there is no ethical or moral reason one should have guilt for committing, then you have more issues than the people you rail against for their "personal issues".
The jury's duty is to see the law done.
Setting THAT aside, if I have done DNA tests and understand the mechanics behind them, am I "refusing to see justice done" if I refuse to vote guilty for a crime where the only evidence is DNA-based and the prosecutor claims their rather lousy testing method guarantees 100% accuracy at closing arguments, or are jurors not allowed to know better or understand when they're being fed a line of bullshit?
If you are being asked to find on a matter of fact, then of course ignorance of the subject matter does no disservice. It's when you start discarding the law because you dislike it morally that juries get into trouble.
Setting THAT aside, why does having the decision made by a single judge beat having a jury?
Because a judge is a professional, and a jury is made up of random individuals whose competence is seriously at question.
So again, because there are some bad lawyers, the entire institution is pointless? That's like saying that because some doctors make mistakes, we need to stop the practice of medicine and have all surgeries performed by twelve random idiots.
You make the same fallacious comparison that the next poster does. Just because some lawyers are wrong and some cases are decided wrong does not make the institution wrong.
That's like saying that because some doctors, somewhere, make mistakes, we should throw out the entire practice of medicine and let laypeople set broken bones and perform bypass surgery.
I prefer my judgments to be rendered by an experienced, competent, informed individual with a knowledge and understanding of the law, and my surgeries to be performed by experienced, competent, informed doctors with a knowledge and understanding of medicine. Respectively, that requires lawyers and doctors- in no case in the professional world does having twelve laypeople make up for having one professional.
As a juror, your job is to do justice. It is not and never will be "fair and equitable" to destroy the life of someone who was acting within the context of a very common moral belief system and in ignorance of a ridiculously complex legal system - even if this is done to protect million and billion dollar business interests who cannot possibly show that any actual damage occurred.
As a juror, your job is generally to make a finding of fact, and more specifically to reach an impartial verdict. As the law is not in any specific way linked to a system of morals, and as the law is not (although people constantly claim it is, but, having been involved in the law, I find this hard to agree with) particulary complicated, then one who breaks the law will pay the penalty. The way to deal with a law you dislike is not to ignore it and whine when you get in trouble- it is to either appeal the law on procedural grounds in a court of law or to repeal it in the legislature. The verdict was fair and equitable here because it was brought according to fair and equitable proceedures and the rule of law, not because of the magnitute of verdict returned, which is essentially irrelevant.
There is no distinction whatsoever between a "de facto right to acquit or not" and the "right [or] obligation to make a decision based on the spirit of the law." If they have a "de facto right to acquit or not" then they must also have the right to base their decisions on the spirit of the law. They also have an obligation to themselves, their countrymen, and the accused, to do justice.
Of course there is a distinction! The distinction is that while you may not be punished for your acts of jury nullifcation (which may in fact constitute technical contempt of court) it is certainly not accepted or reccomended practice.
Further, the court has continously held that judgments cannot be made on the spirit of the law. THe spirit of the law is open to interpretation. The letter is not.
Oh, there are certainly reasons why the court system tosses out knowledgeable jurors, but whether those reasons are "good" or not depends largely upon your point-of-view. I, for one, prefer to be judged by my peers, not by lawyers and ignorant masses.
Somebody else in this discussion had a valid point. You are sitting on the jury for Rosa Parks. Technically she broke the law. Do you find her guilty? Go back further. You are sitting on the jury for a runaway slave. Technically he also broke the law. What if you were on the jury for the Scopes Trial?
Then those cases would be found on the basis of the law. There were difficulties in those cases, yes; but they were not issues for the jury to decide upon. They were issues of proceedural fairness, and as such would have required a judge to deal with in any case. Any jury nullification done in those cases would have made the situation worse, not better, because it would likely have prevented (although perhaps not, it's hard to say) the case from having reached the apellate levels and setting precedent.
Hmm, jury nullification is starting to sound better now, isn't it?
No, it's not- it could have, and likely would have, made the situation worse, better.
There is also a good reason why our constitution requires a trial by a jury of your peers. If the law you are accused of breaking is fundamentally unjust then do you really deserve to be punished for breaking it? Are you telling me that if you were sitting on the jury for any of the above examples you'd allow a conviction to happen? Or how about some modern examples? Would you send a terminally ill person with cancer to prison for possessing medical marijuana?
Issues of fundamental fairness are for a judge or appellate court to decide, not a jury. Had I been sitting on any of the above juries, I would have brought a conviction- because that is what the rule of law requires.
Short of armed insurrection, the jury system is our last line of defense against Government abuses of power. No wonder the courts and "good lawyers" (to quote you) hate it.
Ridiculous. The jury system sets no precedent and rulings can be appealed from a jury decision. Further, do you know how many cases get to a verdict in a jury trial? Less than once percent. Most cases are dealt with well before that point.
A jury trial is very expensive- expect to pay at least $50,000, and it's almost never worth it. The most effective line of defense against government abuse of power is now, and always has been, a strong and effective judiciary.
You would prefer the judge to determine guilt and punishment then ?
Yes.
Listen to yourself. You are defending a practice of discarding jurors on the basis that they are insufficiently ignorant.
No, I am defending the practice of discarding jurors because they refuse to see justice done. As the court pointed out, jury nullification is a bad thing, and there is nothing at all wrong with attempting to stop jurors from practicing it.
I know all about jury nullification, and yet I would never consider it as a valid practice were I on a jury. The problem is that the people who do tend to know about that tend to also advocate it.
Slashdot Mirror
That sounds perfect. I don't suppose you have any idea where one might get one's hands on RFID tags and scanners in bulk? I think one'd have to scan every book's bar code to add it to the database, pair that with an RFID tag and then attach it.
I wonder if it'd be possible to triangulate the tags so you can keep track of the books as they move around without trouble?
Humm...
I have about ~7500 books at home (I have approximately 750 in my home office at the moment) and I know people always want to borrow books. If I had a way to track them, I'd be much happier to lend them out, but of course the article is slashdotted.
What I used to do was create a database as they went out- put in the ISBN, date, time, author, title, etc, etc, etc, and the lendee. Worked pretty well, and I slowly built up the database book by book.
I don't believe freedom of speech is an admirable goal. Does that answer your question?
There's a difference between saying "I think copyright is being used unreasonably" and "Copyright law is a great evil in society".
It's also fairly ridiculous to claim that copyright needs to just up and disappear. Aside from its long-held presence in the common law, it's also good logical sense and enshrined in legal codes around the globe.
See, one of the lovely things about copyright law is that the author of the work gets to decide what to do with it. If they feel like their work should be distributed to whomever, whenever, however, they can certainly decide that.
There are other people who do not want that. By obliterating copyright, you remove their rights.
Nobody is forced against their will to charge money for people to view or redistribute their work. The site you quote does not appear to even consider these issues in the most cursory manner.
There is an argument to be made that copyright is too long. On the other hand, there's the opposite argument that copyright should be eternal and instead the definition for derivative works should be loosened slightly.
As a writer myself, I favor copyright. If at any time I wish to allow my works to be distributed freely in their entirety, I can do that. If I wish it to happen on my death, I can write that into my will. But why should you decide what I may or may not do with my writings?
In fact, most current copyright laws contain exceptions to make reasonable derivative copies, and further, basic themes aren't subject to copyright anyway.
However, I cannot in any respect see how copyright law is evil. It may be unenforceable; it may be unreasonable, even. Neither of those equates with evil.
What, does the word zealot not appear in your mental dictionary?
"One who espouses a cause or pursues an object in an immoderately partisan manner."
That's a good definition, and definitely appropriate.
Um... zealot much?
"Copyright law is a great evil in society"?
"Windows is actively damaging to a child's education"?
"Windows encourages a poor mental model of computation...from its... "priacy is bad"..."?
I think, while your comment has some merit, the reasoning behind it is not necessarily sound. Yes, a lot of asian kids do very well in school (and I agree with your comments about how this tends to regress over generations immersed in a different culture), but it is interesting to note where they excel.
The areas where they excel are areas where rote learning and repetitive memorization prove effective at quickly and accurately regurgitate information, because that is, in most cases, the most effective way to study.
The difficulty is, of course, that quickly and accurately regurgitating facts is essentially a pointless activity, unless you spend your life writing exams for a living. I don't remember exactly when the Magna Carta was introduced (1214?) but ten seconds of research quickly brings me the exact date. Repeat ad nauseum for any of an immense variety of specific facts.
Rather, the ability to quickly sift through large quantities of data for relevant pieces of information to the issue is far more efficient. The exact same data-processing techniques are effective regardless of applied field, and you can replace decades of rote memorization of facts with a few hours of data-processing ability.
What ends up happening is that 'intelligence' these days is not so much a matter of innate talent; nor is it a matter of being able to do anything in specific. It's not really even a matter of work ethic. What it is is a matter of curiosity, the willingness to try and fail, and the ability to quickly and accurately sift through input and discern what is important and relevant to the issue at hand.
These are all skills that can be taught. But to say success is merely a matter of effort is a ridiculous oversimplification. There are plenty of cases where hard work will get you nowhere, and success is merely a matter of being able to place yourself in the right place at the right time with the right tools.
Hard work alone will make you at best slightly better than mediocre, in my opinion.
Harvard's lawyers already work for them. They're called professors. :P
That said, I imagine they'd just toss an injunction at them and let that be that. If they get the injunction, so be it; if they don't... well, so be it.
B) And that's just fine. However, by ruling that the message was not a business message but a personal message, presumably these rules did not apply.
C) And it will not. If you believe that justice has not been served, you (Well, the plaintiff, really) is free to exercise his right to appeal this case to an apellate court.
While I find the judge's decision to be flawed, I find the logical principles it appears to be based upon to be essentially sound.
If I were the judge, my reasoning would go something like this:
Plaintiff has not proven that the e-mail is a bulk e-mail.
It is an unreasonable infringement upon the first amendment rights of the defendant to claim that individuals acting in an individual capacity are not within their rights to send e-mails with a misleading subject line if they so feel like it.
The e-mail appears to be a personal e-mail, and is hence not covered under the variety of statutes that cover personal mail.
As a result, Plaintiff has no case, other than perhaps harassment or similar.
Now, I believe that the judge erred in concluding that the message is personal, but I must also come to the conclusion that this is mostly the plaintiff's fault, as the plaintiff appears to have failed to attempt to prove otherwise, and the defendant's message seems, on the surface, to be relatively personal.
While the judge's judgment may have been flawed, it is not so deeply and obviously flawed that it is worth a disciplinary offense, and it's not particularly stupid, either. That doesn't change the fact that I think it's wrong.
If the plaintiff thinks it's wrong, well, he has plenty of options. Instead of exercising them, however, he whines on slashdot, which says a lot about his actual necessity of using the court system for what he's doing.
I'm sure the Court of Appeal would enjoy laughing you out of the courtroom, but if he's really that dedicated, he could certainly appeal to them and they would consider whether or not the judge made an error on the face of the law.
Of course, this would get him nowhere, because even if he won, the fifty thousand dollars he spent appealing he's not going to get back.
Secondly, there are three things here that people, I think, are misunderstanding.
A) The judge is not obligated to do your fact-finding for you. If you are claiming that the e-mail was a bulk e-mail, prove it. If you are claiming that the e-mail was sent by an automated program, prove it. It's not up to the judge to pore through e-mail headers to decide what's important, and most judges would probably not know how anyway.
B) There is probably a specific legal definition of what 'spam' is, and the likelihood of it magically happening to perfectly dovetail with the general Slashdot opinion is vanishingly small.
C) This is small claims court. Small claims court is, in general, relatively lax compared to any superior or appellate court. Given the number and the types of cases they hear, this is not unexpected. If you want your case to receive the attention you believe it deserves, file a full lawsuit and get a lawyer.
Windows XP is NT 5.1.2600 and Windows Vista is NT 6.0. (or at least 6.something, I think it's 6.0.2600)
I've seen copies of Microsoft Office 2007 Portable at ~200MB, with Excel, Publisher, Powerpoint, and Word.
Except for the criminal record that comes along with having committed theft, sure.
At which point Congress turns around and impeaches him, and THEN starts issuing citations again. If Cheney starts pulling the same, they impeach him, too.
Not that they will do any of it.
But that's neither here nor there.
And yet, you seem to forget that she brought this upon herself. In many ways, it is likely that the judgment brought against her was punitive. She wasted the court's time; she brought no particularly appropriate evidence on her own behalf, and she was given opportunity by the plaintiff to settle. Instead, she chose to go ahead with a court-case that she was almost certain to lose.
And now she (and you) are complaining that the judgment isn't what you want? Well, no shit it's not. You had plenty of other options, and yet you took one that was almost undoubtedly going to end up the worst off for you. A good lawyer, knowing she was guilty and realizing that getting her off would be very hard, if not impossible, would have told her to settle and that'd be it.
Instead, she didn't settle, and they made an example out of her. I can't say I'm particularly sorry- while the RIAA's lawyers tend to often run up against the line of professional responsibility and in some cases breach it, that's not really relevant here.
Imagine you, a random joe making $50,000 a year, goes out and hijacks an oil-tanker carrying $120,000,000 worth of refined gasoline. You run it up against a reef and spill it everywhere. So Exxon-Mobil takes you to civil court and extracts a judgment of $150,000,000 from you. Is that somehow unfair because you're unable to pay it? Your life would be destroyed (not to mention the next twenty years you'll probably spend in jail).
The fact is, you knew what you were doing was illegal when you did it, and you judged the risks acceptable. Now you're complaining because those risks have come around to hit you in the ass again? You can't disclaim responsibility like that.
I meant 'issues of fundamental fairness' in a legal/procedural sense, not a moral one. The two are not the same or even very similar, and your average layman doesn't understand the difference.
Firstly, you are not supposed to be judged on the law 'as it is commonly understood', so that argument is moot.
Secondly, I did not claim the law was too complicated for juries to interpret. I just said they weren't the best at it, and since we already have a profession of people to do that, (lawyers), why are we using random laypeople when we already have a class of technical specialists who are much better at it? It's foolish. Also, the fact the law isn't particularly complicated doesn't mean anyone can follow it. Hell, most people don't. Simplicity in text is very different from application in practice and execution.
Morality is entirely relative. The law is supposed to be a cogent summary of civilizational ethics with a drab of ideology added to the top. There are plenty of things I consider inherently immoral- (the law against murder, to take a random example- but that does not mean that I will nullify any murder cases when I sit on a jury. As a juror, your job is to find a verdict on the facts and the law.
As a citizen, your job is to change the law via democracy if you don't like it. The two duties are entirely separate.
How many preemptory challenges do attorneys get, again? Remind me, I don't think I can count that high...
The jury's duty is to see the law done.
If you are being asked to find on a matter of fact, then of course ignorance of the subject matter does no disservice. It's when you start discarding the law because you dislike it morally that juries get into trouble.
Because a judge is a professional, and a jury is made up of random individuals whose competence is seriously at question.
So again, because there are some bad lawyers, the entire institution is pointless? That's like saying that because some doctors make mistakes, we need to stop the practice of medicine and have all surgeries performed by twelve random idiots.
You make the same fallacious comparison that the next poster does. Just because some lawyers are wrong and some cases are decided wrong does not make the institution wrong.
That's like saying that because some doctors, somewhere, make mistakes, we should throw out the entire practice of medicine and let laypeople set broken bones and perform bypass surgery.
I prefer my judgments to be rendered by an experienced, competent, informed individual with a knowledge and understanding of the law, and my surgeries to be performed by experienced, competent, informed doctors with a knowledge and understanding of medicine. Respectively, that requires lawyers and doctors- in no case in the professional world does having twelve laypeople make up for having one professional.
As a juror, your job is generally to make a finding of fact, and more specifically to reach an impartial verdict. As the law is not in any specific way linked to a system of morals, and as the law is not (although people constantly claim it is, but, having been involved in the law, I find this hard to agree with) particulary complicated, then one who breaks the law will pay the penalty. The way to deal with a law you dislike is not to ignore it and whine when you get in trouble- it is to either appeal the law on procedural grounds in a court of law or to repeal it in the legislature. The verdict was fair and equitable here because it was brought according to fair and equitable proceedures and the rule of law, not because of the magnitute of verdict returned, which is essentially irrelevant.
Of course there is a distinction! The distinction is that while you may not be punished for your acts of jury nullifcation (which may in fact constitute technical contempt of court) it is certainly not accepted or reccomended practice.
Further, the court has continously held that judgments cannot be made on the spirit of the law. THe spirit of the law is open to interpretation. The letter is not.
Your peers are the ignorant masses.
Then those cases would be found on the basis of the law. There were difficulties in those cases, yes; but they were not issues for the jury to decide upon. They were issues of proceedural fairness, and as such would have required a judge to deal with in any case. Any jury nullification done in those cases would have made the situation worse, not better, because it would likely have prevented (although perhaps not, it's hard to say) the case from having reached the apellate levels and setting precedent.
No, it's not- it could have, and likely would have, made the situation worse, better.
Issues of fundamental fairness are for a judge or appellate court to decide, not a jury. Had I been sitting on any of the above juries, I would have brought a conviction- because that is what the rule of law requires.
Ridiculous. The jury system sets no precedent and rulings can be appealed from a jury decision. Further, do you know how many cases get to a verdict in a jury trial? Less than once percent. Most cases are dealt with well before that point.
A jury trial is very expensive- expect to pay at least $50,000, and it's almost never worth it. The most effective line of defense against government abuse of power is now, and always has been, a strong and effective judiciary.
Yes.
No, I am defending the practice of discarding jurors because they refuse to see justice done. As the court pointed out, jury nullification is a bad thing, and there is nothing at all wrong with attempting to stop jurors from practicing it.
I know all about jury nullification, and yet I would never consider it as a valid practice were I on a jury. The problem is that the people who do tend to know about that tend to also advocate it.