01/07/15 – Jim Babb – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Next up is Jim Babb with the Jury Rights Project.
That's at juryrightsproject.com.
Tell us all about it.
It's an education campaign, and the purpose of the campaign is to inform the general public about their right to nullify bad laws.
That means if you get on a jury, you have the power to say not guilty, even if the facts of the case indicate that the person might have committed the crime.
So if somebody smoked a joint, you can say, I don't think that's a legitimate crime.
There's no victim, so I'm going to say not guilty and send that person home to their family.
So when people exercise this right, it's called jury nullification, and it's one of the sort of the final steps that the government has to go through before they can hurt somebody, is to get through that juror.
This campaign in New York City, people can find out about it at juryrightsproject.com.
We've got six kiosk ads that surround the courthouse in southern Manhattan, and we also have a pamphlet and campaign on the sidewalk to inform people about this right.
Great.
Okay, so I have some questions, and I think I already know the answer to some of them, but then again, I think I might be wrong.
So is what you're describing here, is this legal, or this is just because they can't punish a juror for the way he votes, unless it's for a corrupt, you know, bribery-type reason or something like that in the law, and so it's sort of a loophole, or how exactly does that work?
I'm trying to put myself in the position of someone who maybe they've been on a jury before, and the judge told them, if you agree with the prosecution on the facts here, then this guy's guilty, and you must find that way.
Well, it's 100% legal.
It's been a tradition of the justice system for centuries, going back as far as the Magna Carta.
It is an essential part of the very jury process itself.
Oh, then it's a relic of bygone days, like the gold standard, right?
Right.
It's one of those old things that, you know, used to help people.
But it's probably more important today, you know, maybe more important than it's ever been before, because we have more stupid laws on the books than we've ever had.
But there's a lot of history behind it.
One of the first documented historical cases was William Penn around, I think it was around 1670.
He faced a jury.
He had angered the king because he had assembled a group of Quakers without permission, God forbid, but the jury refused to convict.
They said, you know what, that's not a legitimate crime, not guilty.
1850s, the Fugitive Slave Act had made harboring a slave illegal, even in the northern states.
But people did it anyway, because that law is not legitimate.
And again, juries refused to convict people for harboring fugitive slaves.
They let their conscience be their guide and said, no, not going to send somebody to jail.
I don't care if they did harbor a slave.
Prohibition era, they refused to convict people for alcohol-related crimes.
And that eventually was a big part of leading to the repeal of prohibition.
Today, you know, you think of the drug laws as being the biggest category of victimless crimes, and that's huge.
We've got so many people in cages now for victimless crimes.
It's insane.
But in addition to drugs, we've got raw milk or people that watered their lawn when they shouldn't or people that didn't water their lawn when they should or carrying a firearm across a state border when they didn't realize it was, you know, their rights no longer applied.
We have so many, so many ridiculous laws on the books that jury nullification is becoming more and more important today.
And, yeah, I think it's just important.
It's so important that people even hear the term, that there's even such a thing as that.
Because I think, you know, I always think of Bill on King of the Hill saying, well, I was on a jury three times, and we did our duty all three times.
We convicted.
And that really is kind of the way people perceive their role on a jury is they're kind of junior prosecutors for a day.
It's like going on a field trip or something where they get to take part in this thing for a minute, and they don't see it as a chance to actually maybe spare someone, have mercy on someone, rather than going along with and playing a role, fitting into a role with the judge and the prosecutor.
They can play an altogether separate role as a real check on what the government would have done to someone.
I mean, you can read, as you mentioned all the time, the length of the sentences for the most meager of crimes ought to be enough to get just regular, decent people, if they got the idea that it's OK, this is your role, for them to say, you know what, I am not going to go along with this.
Where, you know, before they might, because part of being a good person is going along with this.
And the judge, he sure seemed to really expect me to convict here.
And so after all, everybody agreed.
The guy seemed to have the drugs in his pocket or whatever it was.
And so, you know, where's the argument?
They got to have some kind of dissonance in their head, some voice speaking up, saying, well, you know, they can't convict you for refusing to go along with this.
It's not a crime to acquit.
And you don't have to explain why you decided the evidence isn't good enough or anything like that.
Just vote no.
That's all.
And so for me, just in fact, I even have a bumper sticker that says you've just begun reading about jury nullification.
And then they're supposed to go run off from there.
But that's enough.
I want them to just know the term, have heard the term once in their life before for crying out loud.
You make excellent points.
In fact, I had a friend recently on a jury and he told me a woman actually said to him in the jury deliberations, says, well, he wouldn't even be on trial if he wasn't guilty.
People think that way.
And, you know, we have a society where people are really conditioned to obey authority figures.
And if you if you've been in a courtroom, you see immediately there's there's this guy in a special outfit.
He's sitting at a desk that's a foot or two higher than everybody else.
He's he's adorned with trappings and there's there's flags and there's a giant logo behind his head.
And he's presiding over this room and he he gets a title of royalty and everybody stands up when he comes in.
And, you know, it's like, wow, you know, who's in charge there?
Well, they've struck they structured all of that to make it look like that guy in the black dress is in charge.
But the most powerful person in that room is the juror and they don't have to take commands from anybody.
And they they you're not supposed to check your conscience at the door.
And that is that is basically the purpose of this campaign is just to remind people, yeah, you're the one that's supposed to get between the government and the defendant and make sure this is fair.
They often make it impossible for the jurors to even know what sentence the defendant is facing.
So let's just say, you know, a person that might be facing 30 years in jail because they had, you know, drugs or ran a Web site or who knows what they did.
But, you know, they say, well, gosh, if the jurors knew what we're going to do to this guy, they might not want to convict their conscience might wake up.
So they forbid that.
They'll forbid any kind of information that might get to the jury to be like, hey, this is actually a nice person.
And he really didn't hurt anybody.
And we want him to be in a cage for the rest of his life.
And so so any so that's why the work that we're doing is outside the courtroom, reaching out to the general public.
We do it near courthouses.
But we want everyone to get this idea that, look, you're going to get jury duty.
You're going to get a summons at some point.
It's completely normal to say, no, I don't want to go.
Get me out of that.
But it's a huge opportunity when you realize, first, how corrupt the U.S. justice system is and to what a huge opportunity you have to get somebody off the hook.
Right.
All right.
Well, hold it right there.
When we get back, we'll have more with Jim Babb about jury nullification and this great project to do something about it.
They're raising funds and they've already got a bunch of ads out next to the courthouse in New York City there.
This is people always ask them, yeah, but what can we do?
Hey, here's something you could do that could really save somebody's life.
So get involved.
We'll be right back.
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All right, so welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the phone with Jim Babb here.
And I'm real sorry again for screwing up your name and identity and all that stuff earlier.
Apologize about that.
I screw up sometimes.
This is a very important project here.
Jury Rights Project dot com.
And it says here I clicked the wrong tab here.
One of these.
It's the jury rights activists campaign to end victimless crimes prosecutions in New York City in 2015.
That's a great goal.
It's a huge goal, but it's also a narrowly defined one.
New York City is a big city, but still, it's a specific thing that you're trying to push a specific campaign.
And one that, you know, with any kind of success will set a benchmark and a great example for what can be done in the future along these lines.
And perfect timing.
And I don't know.
I guess it must be a coincidence that we have the outrage over the Eric Garner grand jury.
No bill going on.
And we have the police backlash where they're saying, well, we're now only going to arrest people when it's necessary.
Instead of like usual, when it's our fighting age, male sweeps of black people, black neighborhoods or whatever it is, is their usual thing.
And so all reports I've seen from far away, Austin, Texas, is that the Joker and the criminal element have not taken over.
Muggings have not skyrocketed, et cetera, et cetera.
Everything's fine.
Everything's better now.
Less cops, less enforcement of offenses against ordinances.
And they're sticking only to busting people for actually committing crimes against other people, that kind of thing.
Well, so what a great baton to pick up and run with right here.
Here's how you can keep it this way.
Here's how you can tell those cops, yeah, don't bother ever going back to those unnecessary arrests because we're just not going to give you convictions on them.
We're done with this.
Necessary arrests only.
Thank you.
I thought this was a free country, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, this is it's just it's just going on for way too long.
And this particular courthouse has a history of of of persecuting people.
Professor Julian Hykland did pamphleting there.
They were particularly cruel to him several years ago.
He defied their orders to not pamphlet at this courthouse and they hurt him physically.
They put him in jail.
They they they fabricated charges of jury tampering.
They went and they just went to war with Professor Hykland at this very courthouse.
And he fought them and he won and he laid the groundwork to for us to come in now and say, yeah, we do have a right to be here.
You can't touch us.
We're going to pamphlet.
This is honest information.
It's not jury tampering.
We're going to be informing the public here.
And that was what he won in court.
Was that argument that this is simple First Amendment politics here?
Well, you know, what it really came down to was the law says you're not allowed to to influence in writing a juror connected to a particular case.
So because we're reaching out to the general public, this is not about a particular case.
The court made that distinction and said, OK, that's fine.
You can do that.
You're not attempting to to to actually influence a particular case.
Well, that's a very important, very important decision.
I don't know how binding that is anywhere else.
But it's a very important example, because I've heard of that a lot of times where they try to call it jury tampering.
They try to outlaw it somehow.
They try to make up an excuse to prevent people from teaching each other about jury rights.
I know that.
But, you know, in a way, the more grumpy they get about it, the better it is for our campaign.
We did a similar campaign last year in Washington, D.C., and what made it really take off was the fact that there was a trial.
I think it was a murder trial.
And a prosecutor says to the judge, hey, judge, we need to make sure none of these jurors saw those billboards outside.
And there was a Washington Post reporter in the audience and the Washington Post reporters like billboards.
What?
What are you talking about?
So then later that week, a photograph of our billboards appeared on the front page of The Washington Post with an article.
So, you know, we we kind of need them to if they could be a little bit grumpy and help me generate some media attention.
That'd be wonderful.
They're there.
The prosecutors objections in D.C. ended up getting a nationwide NPR story and television and just sort of triggered a media avalanche.
So I'm looking for that here.
Right on.
All right.
So let's talk about hyperlinks.
Let's talk about email lists and places where people can support and all the information you can possibly hit them with here.
OK.
Jury Rights Project dot com slash NYC takes you right to this campaign.
You can see pictures of the ads.
There's a GoFundMe.
There's a Bitcoin link.
You can get involved on the jury rights project.
There's also an educational course that you can sign up for for lessons about jury rights.
Fully informed Jury Association is another great resource.
F.I.J.A. dot org.
These guys have been at it for decades, educating the public about these rights to excellent sources people can go to.
And we've still got time.
So tell us some more stories about, you know, really criminal prosecutions in the other sense where people really don't deserve it.
And we're where the jurors have stood up for the innocent and won.
You got some of those.
Sure.
You know, there there's quite a few.
There was a raw milk case where I think like seven out of eight charges were dropped up in Wisconsin recently.
Yeah.
This heinous.
Somebody was actually providing a product for customers.
And but it was raw milk.
So, oh, you know, that was a big deal.
I witnessed one myself.
Can raw milk get you higher?
Too dangerous.
In New Jersey, there's a man, Ed Fortune, who goes by the name of N.J. Weedman, was on trial for they caught him with a with a pound of weed in his trunk and he faced two charges.
One was simple possession.
The other was distribution charge.
And he made jury nullification a big part of his media outreach campaign, even though the judge forbid him from mentioning it.
He went to court.
We did pamphleting outside the courtroom.
There was a good, a good volunteer effort.
And there was really jury nullification really made the news big.
Thanks to thanks to Ed's work.
That's what you need is rumors.
You need rumors going around courthouses.
Oh, did you hear this is the one that they're going to nullify?
That kind of thing.
Right.
But so Ed actually says to the jury, he goes, you know, they call me N.J. Weedman.
Did you think I was going to have a joint?
Of course, that's my personal stash.
And he said, in fact, I'm eating pot brownies right now here in court.
The jury sided with him.
Well, the first he got convicted for simple possession, which was a Mr.
Meaner charge, which he was not concerned about.
But it was the what was going to possibly put him in jail for years was the distribution charge.
First trial was a hung jury.
They retried him, came back not guilty on distribution, despite the fact that he he freely admitted to having a pound of marijuana in his trunk.
That's great.
Which normally would be enough to get you sent away for several years.
So was that jury nullification?
I don't know.
Did they just fail to make their case?
I don't know.
Ed seems to think it had had a big role and it's hard to deny it.
There was another case in New Hampshire maybe two years ago where a man said, I use marijuana for religious purposes.
And the jury said not guilty.
So it's happening.
It's happening all the time.
And you're not necessarily going to hear about it because you don't have to tell the judge why you're saying not guilty.
You just sit there and say not guilty.
That's all you have to do.
If you feel that judge, if you feel that law is unjust, you say not guilty.
If you if you feel that law is being misapplied, then you just say not guilty.
If you don't think the pun, if you think the punishment is going to be too harsh for the crime, you say not guilty.
You know, we're thinking, feeling human beings.
And we need to use our conscience when we go into that courtroom because the jury is the only one with the conscience in there.
The prosecution doesn't.
The judge doesn't.
They're you know, everything is stacked against the defendant.
So see, that's the thing, man, is everybody's imagining TV where so much fairness is built into the system.
You know, in law and order, they're happy.
That is this is always the start of act two of every episode of law and order is, oh, we falsely concluded that it was the wrong guy.
You're free to go now.
We think it's this guy.
And they're perfectly happy to change their mind about who they're going to.
You know, everything is based on getting it right, making sure we get it right.
And, you know, I grew up watching Matlock and it just seems like, well, of course it has to be fair or else they wouldn't be able to get away with making it not fair.
It's only when you leave TV for a minute and you get to real courthouses that it's what you talk about.
Like, no, the jurors don't even get to know what sentence the guy's even facing.
They don't know whether they're sending the guy to the penitentiary for 30 years or whether he's going to get a slap on a wrist or what.
They don't really you know, they're maybe made unaware of much of what an honest Matlockian defense might want to present to them because it's already been excluded in hearings by the judge from being allowed.
You know, so that's the thing.
If people really have an idea how unfair it is and how it's how simple it could be for them to inject a little fairness into the system, I think that'd be great.
You see people sign up for jury duty on purpose instead of, you know, avoiding it at all costs.
Anyway, I'm sorry I talked too much for other people's interviews, but this great interview has been Jim Babb.
He's at JuryRightsProject.com, JuryRightsProject.com slash NYC.
Thanks very much, Jim.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
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