Be a nullifying juror if your state makes abortion illegal

[bluestateguy]

(Every time I've posted this, it has dropped into the archives rather quickly. I'm going to keep trying.)

I've already decided. If my state bans abortion and they waste my time by putting me on a jury in case where someone is charged with having/performing an illegal abortion, I will be a nullifying juror. I won't even listen to testimony. Not guilty, no matter what! If there are enough jury nullifications, then abortion laws can be made unenforceable. Jury nullification is democratic and empowering.

[MrModerate]

1. I've heard the term, but don't really understand it . . .

Can you expand on your post?

[lectrobyte]

4. It's called jury nullification. For example, you are on the jury

for someone busted for marijuana possession. You don't agree with the mandatory minimum no-tolerance sentence, so although the person is perhaps obviously guilty, you vote to acquit.

[MrModerate]

11. OK, now I get it. However, isn't it illegal? Don't you risk . . .

a contempt of court citation (or some such) if you fail to follow the instructions to the jury that require you to only consider approved testimony (and not your personal opinion)?

[lectrobyte]

12. I don't know, but I don't think so. Sounds like a "hung jury" kind of

situation, and as far as I know, those aren't illegal. yet.

[Burning Water]

13. NO you don't.

Although I don't know what would happen if you publicly stated that was your reason. Just keep saying "I didn't think he was guilty". They can't touch you. AFter all, you, not they, are the finder of fact.

[MrModerate]

16. So, as long as you lie convincingly about your motivation . . .

You're protected. I do recall some jurors getting toasted for (apparently) NOT lying convincingly enough about why they hung a jury.

[Burning Water]

23. Actually,

you don't have to give any explanation, whatsoever.

[northzax]

6. jury nullification is basically

appealing to the Jury to ignore the facts and the law and sympathize with the defendant. Since all it takes is one "not-guilty" to prevent a conviction, you only need one person on the jury to say "well, I would have lynched that n****r too" to get away with murder.

[northzax]

2. not really

Jury nullification is democratic and empowering. Jury nullification is the reason many Klansmen were never convicted of murder after lynching blacks in the bad old days. Even if you could find a prosecutor willing to bring charges, why bother? the good old boys will never convict one of their own. So if it is democratic and empowering for you, then the same applies to them, right?

[bluestateguy]

7. Because blacks were barred from juries

That is much less of a problem today.

[northzax]

8. still, same thing, right?

a willful decision to ignore the law because you sympathize with the defendant?

[Catrina]

20. No, the Founding Fathers wanted to make sure that the people

could nullify laws that were not just. They understood the powers they gave to Congress to make laws. They were also aware that Congress, like the King, might pass laws that did not benefit the people. So they made 'jury nullification' legal in the event that a jury was required to find someone guilty under a law that was not just.

They are not necessarily sympathizing with the defendent, they could detest him for that matter. It has a broader intent than that. If they feel that the law itself should never have been passed, and that it will victimize the people, they may nullify the law itself.

The Founding Fathers knew how the British kings used the law as a weapon against the people. It was standard procedure under the British Empire. They wanted the people to have a tool that could prevent that.

However, even though it is perfectly legal, and takes only one juror who is aware of the right of a juror to do this, laws have been passed to prevent the judge or the defence lawyers to inform the jury of that right. Which is why the public needs to be more informed.

Iow, it gives power to the people to disagree with a tyrannical government and to act on it.

If you look up what Madison et al had to say about it, imo, it is an excellent tool to prevent the government from the law as a weapon against the people.

In the case in California about the farmer who grew medical marijuana, legally, was charged by the Federal Government with a crime, the jury felt they had no choice other than to convict him, but they did have a choice, had they known about it.

That was a clear case of the Federal Government acting in a tyranical manner, and had they been informed, just one juror could have acted on the conscience of all of them. They said they did not agree with the Federal law that overrode the state law, under which he had acted legally, but felt the evidence forced them to convict him. Some of them even cried but thought they had to convict him.

So jury nullification is a powerful tool in the hands of the people, in drug cases like that and if necessary, in abortion cases in the future, should it come up. But the public needs more civic lessons. I found out about it on another board and once I researched it, I had to agree, it is an excellent way to undermine nasty, anti-American laws. After a while, when they can't get convictions, they don't bother and the laws will change to reflect the will of the people. That's what the FFs wanted to happen.

[Hamlette]

3. they usually don't put people on trial for abortion

primarily becaue doctor's won't do them if they are illegal and those who do operate underground and are difficult to "catch".

I remember the days when abortion was illegal in my state and don't remember any prosecutions.

I am not dissing your plan but it is not likely to help very much.

[sui generis]

5. Well there would be a LOT of trials

Aren't there something like 20 million abortions a year in the U.S.? Whatever the number, divide that per capita into your state population, per year, every year for ten years and try and figure out if they would even have time to address parking tickets.

There aren't enough cops, jails, lawyers, judges or courts available to try them all.

When 1/3rd of the U.S. population makes a restrictive rule about the other 2/3rds, there's gonna be trouble, and we have to let them know that.

[lectrobyte]

14. They'd go after doctors and abortion clinics first...

[sui generis]

18. all your uterus' are belong to me!!!1!

I'm not series!!!!1!

What a weird country. We're perfectly willing to tell people what they can and can't do with their own bodies for 18 years and 9 months, yet shocked and horrified and outraged when Afghani men tell women to wear burkhas.

[lectrobyte]

25. We are on the road to Gilead. And some days I think Atwood was

an optimist.

[BiggJawn]

9. How you gonna get through the vetting w/o perjuring yourself?

because they way they stack juries in this age, you have about as much chance of getting on a jury hearing an abortion case as I do of partying down with Jan Ulrich.

[bluestateguy]

10. That's the real trick, isn' t it?

I can't help you with that.

[BiggJawn]

15. Guess you could always lie.

What's the worse they could do to you? A year?

The "Rule of Law" Dittomonkeys would make sure that everyone knew that you sort of "stretched" the Truth to get empanelled.

[bunkerbuster1]

21. Depends on the kind of questions they'd ask

If they ask if you've contributed to NARAL and you have, but you say you haven't, that's perjury.

If they ask you if you believe that human life begins at conception and you fib and say in effect "Praze Jebus YAY-ess it does, them fertilized eggs is BAYBEEZ", well, I don't see how that's perjury.

[fasttense]

17. That is very true about the legality of abortion actually being on trial

I don't remember a single case where a woman was tried for having an abortion in the 1950s to the 1960s. I do remember doctors losing their licenses for performing abortions, if the state could prove it.

Some facts to ponder as the dancing Supremes do away with privacy laws:

"By the mid-twentieth century, both proponents and opponents of abortion reform agreed on three central propositions. First, illegal abortionists were thriving. Criminologists found that abortion had become the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the United States, surpassed only by gambling and narcotics. One investigator determined that some expert abortionists were performing as many as forty-five abortions a day and between four and five thousand abortions a year.

Second, the omnipresence of illegal abortion had created a substantial maternal health crisis. Doctors and lawyers described criminal abortion as a "hidden social canker," "a festering social ill," and "one of the major medical and social problems of the nation." "Driving abortion underground," commentators pointed out, "the statutes have brought it about that abortion performed by the women themselves, by incompetent midwives, or by doctors who, even though they may be skilled, must operate with a secrecy which precludes the subsequent attention to the safest performance of the procedure."

Third, and most important, significant statutory restrictions on abortion were unenforceable. "All efforts to control the incidence of criminal abortion by legislation," public health specialists concluded, had "resulted in failure." A 1963 law review article noted that "our nation's abortion laws have admittedly kept legal abortions to a minimum, just as the eighteenth amendment virtually eliminated the legal consumption of liquor."

Nevertheless, the author continued, "the abortion enactment have been no more successful in preventing abortion than the eighteenth amendment was in eradicating drinking."

Oh boy can't wait for our great new world where abortion goes underground at the risk of a mother's life and at the great profit of criminals.

http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/rethink.html

[SoCalDem]

19. Won't be necessary.

There are some cases RACING towards SCOTUS right now. They will not wait too long to "re-test" Roe. If it gets reversed, this will go back to the states, and we will have a patchwork quilt of "local laws".

The irony of SCOTUS re-ruliing on this is that transportation is quite good these days, and young people have their own money these days, so most girls who decide on abortion, will find a way to go to a state that has legal abortions.. The poor girls in states where all surrounding states are against it , will have a problem, but they have problems right now too.

[sui generis]

22. well, that's only because they haven't yet made it illegal

to travel past checkpoints without identification papers, including getting on a greyhound bus.

Oh wait . . . my bad. It is indeed illegal to attempt to bypass TSA measures in any form of public transportation.

[Katherine Brengle]

24. This is not a solution... It's not as simple as a bus ticket.

Saying that young women can simply travel to a state where abortion is legal is not an argument. We already know this--the fact of the matter is that they should not have to.

If Roe is overturned, women's reproductive rights will be shot back 40 years and we will have to fight to get them back.

It's not as simple as a bus ticket.

[sui generis]

26. also suspect that when public transportation gets around to

asking the purpose of your visit, i.e., international travel does that now, then "lying" about traveling for one's abortion will be a federal crime against the department of homeland security.

They already ask at the airport on some airlines, although I can't tell if it's casual or scripted.