04/28/10 – Iloilo Marguerite Jones – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Elo Jones, Executive Director of the Fully Informed Jury Association.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you, Scott.
Nice to be with you.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
So, um, I know where to start.
I got a story.
Okay, go.
This is a story about a friend of mine who years ago, and this is not a political, very ideological type person or whatever, a person with a strong sense of fairness, but not really, you know, well-versed in how things really are, just the basic basics.
And this person served on a jury in Texas, and at least at the time, and probably still, the law was that if somebody has drugs and you're in the same room as them, then you also are in possession.
And in the case, it was clear that the cocaine belonged to one or maybe two of the people, but there were five or six people arrested who, you know, there was no real indication that they had anything to do with the terrible crime of using drugs that the government sells.
And so this person convicted them anyway and explained after that, well, you know, the judge said that the law is clear about this and that if you find that the facts of the case show that these people were in the room and that the cocaine was in the room too, then they are guilty.
And so the reason this really sticks in my mind is because the story was told to me with like a bit of cognitive dissonance behind it.
Well, it didn't really seem fair, but the judge said that's the law, right?
So you've got to do what you've got to do.
Was my friend in this anecdote a fully informed juror?
Obviously he wasn't.
Had he been, he would have known that government, politicians, and bureaucrats as well who pass laws by statute are perfectly capable of passing the most ridiculously silly, venal, and vicious laws into being in our country and in all the jurisdictions that fall below that in terms of their size.
And we know this because we have seen such things as the Fugitive Slave Act.
We have seen prohibition against alcohol.
We have seen the Vietnam protesters arrested for, of all things, disturbing the peace when they were trying to protect the peace.
Now, what happens is that when you have someone who doesn't understand the authority they have as a juror, they probably will follow the judge.
We're trained to be obedient to authority in this nation.
Our government schools, our government indoctrination centers for children are largely tasked with being sure that the children are indoctrinated to be absolutely obedient to authority, and that includes waiting for permission to fulfill bodily functions such as going to the bathroom or getting a drink of water.
And I want everyone to think about that.
Here's a little child who is trained that they must wait for permission to stand up, quietly walk out of the room, and go use the bathroom.
Instead, they have to announce to everyone that they need to do this, and then they have to wait for permission from the authority figures.
So it's no surprise, I think, to any of us that individuals who are called to serve on juries very often do not have any sense that they have individual action options.
They don't realize that they can simply refuse to enforce bad laws.
They can refuse to enforce any action by any individual which is a violation of human rights.
And in this case, of course, it was a blatant violation of human rights on many levels.
But let's just talk about the fact that being in a room with someone who may be violating another law does not make you guilty of violating the law.
And if we're going to be making guilt by association, then pretty soon it could be everybody on the same block, couldn't it?
Or everyone in the same city could be guilty of violating the same law, even though in this case the law itself is a violation of human rights.
So your friend obviously didn't know that.
And so let's talk a little bit today about what it means to be a fully informed juror, why we should have fully informed jurors, and why this nation was founded with that as one of its ruling principles for the justice system.
Before we get into it, I want to hear all you've got to say, and we've still got 25 minutes to really discuss this at length and in depth here.
But I want to kind of clarify or give you a chance maybe to kind of disclaim here perhaps.
There's a certain kind of political activist, which my friend Anthony Gregory at the Independent Institute calls, he calls them the technicalitarians or their philosophy technicalitarianism.
And this is the belief system whereby if you just go to the right website and look at the right thing and figure out, then you don't have to ever pay a ticket.
You can tell a judge to go do whatever.
You can do what you want.
You know what I'm talking about.
Individual sovereignty, the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, you need a gold fringe on your flag and spell your name in all lowercase letters and all these kinds of silly loophole type things that, you know, sometimes they seem to be citing old law that maybe used to be true or something.
And I just want to give you a chance to differentiate yourself from that kind of sort of half thought out, half informed kind of thing.
Thank you.
Let me say this.
Jurors are formed and have been formed since the Magna Carta fundamentally for the protection of the individual against the government depredation and government seizure or government punishment or government prosecution.
And it doesn't matter if the government is King John, as it was in the case when the Magna Carta was put together, which formed one of the basis for common law tenants of the jury.
Or if it is a jury today, which is constituted to protect against government enforcing bad laws.
A couple of years ago we were part of a case in New York, and I don't know if you heard of the St. Patrick Four.
They were four Catholic war protesters, Catholic peace workers, who staged a protest at a military recruiting center in the state of New York.
And they were charged with conspiracy to impede an officer of the United States.
After they were found innocent or found not guilty in the state courts, the federal courts stepped in and charged them with conspiracy, which carries a rather significant jail term and fine if convicted, up to six years in prison and a quarter of a million dollars in fines.
Well, we worked with them and helped them, and they, by the way, served as their own defense, that they were not merely, they were actually protesting both the heinousness of the whole war industry and of taking young innocent children and teaching them how to kill other people.
And they were protesting the killing of innocent people in other countries who had never had any argument with the United States other than that we were invading their country and killing innocent parents and children.
And I want to emphasize that because it's not just enough to say they were killing innocent people.
They were killing people who were innocent, but they were also parents of someone or children of someone.
They were human beings such as you and I.
And so I was very sympathetic to these war protesters since I've been engaged in war protesting since the Vietnam War and in human rights since I was with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
This is obviously something I believe in, is protecting human rights anywhere, of anyone, because all humans have the same rights anyway.
Back to technicalities.
There is no technicality involved in jurors exercising their authority.
Any human being anywhere in the world has a human right to make decisions based on conscience.
They have a right to consult their own conscience, to render decisions based on their own perception of justice and right and wrong.
And they may be mistaken sometimes, but so have Supreme Court justices been mistaken and most judges make mistakes as well.
This has nothing to do with any technicality or any tweak in the law.
So at the end of the day, basically, if I'm reading you right here, at the end of the day the point is if a juror decides, I'm not voting to convict, there's nothing that the government can do about that.
A juror has complete immunity to decide to refuse to go along with what the state wants, right?
That's correct.
Jurors cannot be punished for their verdict, nor are they required to give a reason for their verdict to anyone.
However, I want to interject a small caveat here, because if a juror has accepted a bribe to render a certain verdict, or if that juror has been threatened and is under duress to render a certain verdict, then of course that juror is not acting in good faith in either instance.
And I don't want to excuse people who act in those ways.
I also don't want to excuse the system during the Civil Rights era that allowed all white juries, because blacks weren't allowed to vote or be on juries, so all white juries were allowed to find racist killers not guilty.
I'm not excusing those incidents by what I'm saying, but I want to point out that in those instances it is a broader system that is flawed rather than the conscience of the juror in question.
Okay, because the reason I picked the fight about the technicalitarianism is because – and I am really ignorant about this, so you can set me straight.
I may be misparaphrasing your own position here or something.
But people talk about a juror has the power to judge not just the facts of the case, but whether the law is just too.
And it sounds to me like you're saying philosophically they do, and in the sense that they don't have to explain why they refuse to convict somebody and the fact that they have immunity, that means that they can just simply refuse to apply what they see as an unjust law to someone, even if the facts of the case fit.
But there seems to be kind of this whole debate about, you know, at some point there was a Supreme Court decision that overthrew hundreds of years' worth of law that said no, juries can only decide the facts, not the law.
And so a judge will instruct a juror, as in my story, if you find these people were in the room, then you must apply this law to them.
And he sort of says it in a way which implies some kind of consequence if they don't go along or something.
Can you set me straight on all this?
I can.
There has never been a Supreme Court decision which overturned the authority and prerogative of the individual juror to render a verdict based on conscience.
The Sparf and Hansen v. the United States ruling, which said that judges no longer had to inform citizens of their right because it was in common knowledge, it was a part of the fabric of the community and of society, if you will, is one that they often refer to.
But it doesn't say that jurors no longer have the right to decide both the law and the facts in that case.
And when people bring up that question, I tell them that the next time they're in court and the judge says, you must obey the law as I give it to you, even if you disagree with the law, it's time to raise your hand and say, excuse me, here's what was said in all these Supreme Court decisions.
What law changed that fact?
The judge will not be able to come up with the case to cite a reversal of that.
The trial by jury right is mentioned four times in the Constitution, in Article 3, Section 2, and then in the 5th, 6th, and 7th Amendments.
And again, however, even though these are wonderful legal arguments, they have very little to do with what I consider to be the human right argument, which, as far as I'm concerned, supersedes any law.
Laws are simply codifications of our human rights.
There's a King of the Hill episode, which I don't know about you, but I love that show because it reminds me of my neighborhood I grew up in.
And Bill, the big, fat divorce guy with no hair from across the street, is talking about how, yep, I served on a jury four times, and we did our duty all four times.
Conviction.
And really, I mean, that's what people kind of, without really thinking it out and saying it all the way through out loud in English or whatever, that is kind of what people think of being on a jury is about, is really kind of being deputized to help the cops get a bad guy.
That's what people think they're doing there.
That's very much the truth.
And again, I think that goes back to the fact that we, if you have suffered through government schools, you have probably been inculcated with the entire notion that you must not only be a part of the group, a cooperative part of that group, but you also must be obedient to the authority of that group, which is the teacher.
And that carries over into life.
And I think in most instances, when people serve on juries and there is someone on trial and the choice is whether to send them to jail or not, and I won't even say most, but I will say in many instances, that person should be in jail.
We have jails and prisons for a reason, Scott, and that is to keep people who are dangerous to individuals out of society so that they cannot harm more people.
Unfortunately, today, more than half of the people who are in prison are there for victimless actions.
They have never hurt any other human being.
So our system has become askew and out of control.
And this is a perfectly peaceful way that any person of conscience can take an action to bring about change, to help to bring back into the purview of justice the system we have which is supposed to render justice.
And they can do that because when they refuse to convict, that sends a message to the law enforcement people as well as the politicians that the community does not recognize the validity of these laws.
And this has worked, by the way, as far back as the Salem Witch Trials, which ended because, I believe it was 34 cases in a row, the jury simply refused to convict because they were tired of it.
And I'm sure you know about William Penn who...
Wait, wait, wait.
I want to stop you right there.
I like how they acquitted, I don't know, what, four, and then the prosecutors brought 30 more cases.
It took 34 before they finally quit.
Well, to get the message...
There's a real lesson about what it means to be a prosecuting attorney right there, I think.
There's a lot of prosecutorial abuse in this country.
And, of course, when jurors refuse to convict under a bad law, that only affects one case.
It doesn't create chaos.
It doesn't create lawlessness.
It's only in one specific case with one specific defendant or set of defendants.
It doesn't nullify the entire law for the entire community.
And the reason it does that is because sometimes it may be a good law, but it may be misapplied in this instance.
And so it should be invalidated.
It should be held as not a good law when it's misapplied.
But moving up into more recent times, even during Prohibition, juries refused to convict people who were selling whiskey.
And more recently, even today, people are refusing to convict individuals who are growing hemp plants for medical uses.
They are refusing to convict people who have hemp in their possession for medical uses, for use against pain or something like that.
And, again, jurors cannot be punished for their verdict, nor do they need to give a reason for their verdict to anyone.
And, again, there are those exceptions.
If you are taking money to render a certain verdict, or if you have been threatened to render a certain verdict, then those instances are instances where the verdict is being fixed.
But because we have such a terrible situation of jury stacking these days, by all the lawyers involved, they try to get the people on the jury who are going to bring in the verdict they want.
We no longer have juries who are not stacked, by and large, in this country.
Even though I happen to live in Montana, and I've served on a couple of juries here, and I loved what the prosecutor said in these cases.
He said, do any of you have a reason you can't be on this jury?
I mean, do any of you, are you related to the defendant?
Are you related to the prosecution?
Can you be fair?
And, you know, he said, if you can be fair, stand up, and then go sit down in a jury seat.
And I think that was perfect, because it recognized that we all knew how to be honest-thinking individuals and rational people, and we could examine our own motive far better than he could through questioning.
Oh, that's interesting.
You know, I met someone who was a professional jury-picking scientist, and their job was going through all the focus groups like Frank Luntz or whatever, and this is exactly the makeup of the jury that you want to get the outcome that you want, which, you know, I think that's great if they're working for defense attorneys, but when the state, which is already outmatches virtually any defendant, a trillion to one in their resources and ability to put on a case, if they can use Frank Luntz' methods to pick their perfect focus group for pitching their case, and we already, you know, as you talked about, generations and generations of government school has us in a place where prosecutors don't even care if they convict innocent people.
In fact, there's another little anecdote.
I met an assistant DA from Harris County.
That's Houston, Texas, said the slogan, this is what they all tell each other, I mean everyone except her, of course.
Every other assistant district attorney has a slogan, which is if they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal, which means that anybody that are brought to them, anyone who is brought to them by the cops is getting prosecuted full force, and they do not care at all.
They're not even interested in whether the people are guilty or not.
If they really didn't do it, they'll get out when the burden of proof is on them.
When we live in a system like that, it seems like, you know, there's almost even no point in calling it the Bill of Rights and the American judicial system anymore.
It's some other creature now.
That's true, and I want to emphasize that these days the focus in the courts is on winning rather than on rendering justice.
The only people usually sitting in a courtroom when there's a jury seated who are very concerned about rendering justice are the members of the jury, because both attorneys are there to win, and the judge is a government employee, so he's there to protect the people who sign his paycheck, he or she, even though they may not tell you that.
Judges often have a conflict of interest from the very beginning because they're paid by the people who are making the laws, and they are getting their paycheck from the same entity as the prosecutor.
So they have a vested interest in protecting and perpetuating the system.
But let me, if I may, pause.
That's an important point.
That's a very important point.
You can try to have an independent judiciary, but at the end of the day, even if the judge calls the prosecutors the government, he's still the government too.
Yes, and may I give some information on how people can get more information about serving on a jury right now?
Yes, please do, and I'm sorry that I didn't say the name of the website at the beginning.
We have an 800 number you can call, and you will be able to leave your name and mailing address.
Please let them know you heard this show, and that number is 1-800-T-E-L-J-U-R-Y, 1-800-TELL-JURY, with one L in numbers, that's 1-800-H-3-5-5-8-7-9.
We also have a website where there is a wealth of information, and that's F-I-J-A-dot-O-R-G.
I imagine Antiwar.com will have it up on their website, a link to that when they archive this interview.
If you would like to get in touch with us, you can leave a message on the 800 number, or you can reach us here at the office through our website.
Again, the website is F-I-J-A-dot-O-R-G.
Our mission is to teach everyone that when you serve as a juror on any jury, it is your job to refuse to convict anyone unless there is a victim.
If there is no actual human victim, there is no crime.
This is the most important vote you have.
With this vote, you can send a message to the justice system as well as to the politicians that the laws they are trying to enforce, and this goes all the way back again to the Fugitive Slave Act, that law, to prohibition, to Vietnam-era protesters, and now to medical marijuana and more war protesters, that you refuse to enforce laws which are not acceptable to the community, that do not serve justice, and do not serve to keep people safe from violent actions brought by other humans against them.
We are here to protect human rights for all people.
All humans have the same rights.
Okay, great.
I got two more things here.
First of all, everybody, I'm talking with Elo Jones.
I'm saying that right?
Yes.
Elo Jones, she's the executive director of the Fully Informed Jury Association, my new friend here.
I'm having such a good time with this.
So two more things.
One, I really appreciate the way that you emphasize, and I'd like to, I guess, give you a chance to emphasize again that this is not some kind of really radical, ideological libertarianism necessarily, or conservatism, or liberalism, or anything else.
It's not a fist in the air kind of thing.
You're talking about, this is the basic basics for everybody in this society, is that, listen, the jury is the last check and balance.
You do not have to go along with the prosecution of people for things that they should not be in jeopardy of their life and liberty for.
You just don't have to do it.
It's not a crazy, radical thing.
It's more American than Samuel Adams.
Correct.
It is more American than Samuel Adams.
In fact, John Adams said in 1771, it is not only his right but his duty to find a verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.
And John Jay, the first U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice said, the jurors have the right to determine the law as well as the facts in any controversy.
This is not a new or radical concept.
It is simply a traditional concept.
It is the traditional role.
It is why we have juries.
Otherwise, why would you even have a jury?
Because the judge could decide the verdict or a computer could decide the verdict.
Okay.
Now, I'm almost out of time, but I've got to play police state's advocate here for a second, which is that John Jay was a long time ago, seriously.
And a lot of things have changed since then.
And we have a living constitution now that, you know, things are a bit different, and that if juries could just go around judging the application of the law in the way that you describe in today's current, you know, in this day and age, it would amount to lawlessness and anarchy, and we can't have that.
Well, it wouldn't amount to lawlessness because, as I pointed out earlier, this only applies in one specific instance, and that is the case before the jury.
It is only through repeated nullifications of a law that a message actually becomes apparent to politicians because they don't watch every verdict.
And so it takes a long time to build up the apparent resistance to a bad law.
And even though, yes, we live in different times, the Constitution does not contain an amendment that says that jurors now must act as robots and abide by the instructions of the judge.
There is no such amendment to the Constitution.
All right, everybody.
That is Elo Jones, executive director of the Fully Informed Jury Association.
That's FIJA.org, F-I-J-A.org.
And give us your phone number one more time.
1-800-TELL-JURY, that's 1-800-835-5879.
Thank you so much for your time on the show today.
Thank you, Scott.