Time: Sun May 25 04:58:20 1997
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Date: Sun, 25 May 1997 04:43:45 -0700
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: MAP: SENT LAT on JN

<snip>
>
>Letter to the Editor, Los Angeles Times
>From:        Peter Webster           email: vignes@monaco.mc
>       ...
>
>RE:     Judges Responsible for Searching Out Biased Jurors
>          Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1997 
>
>Sir,
>The statement of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals "categorically
>rejecting" jury nullification will go mostly uncriticised in present-day
>conservative America. But it is the true conservative who should be
>extremely alarmed by such a statement.
>
>As Court of Appeals certainly knows, jury nullification has been abused in
>the past, and it may well be abused again in the future. Yet jury
>nullification remains one of the most potent mechanisms the public has at
>its disposal to prevent bad laws from taking an insidious toll. Jurors
>should be fully informed of their rights to nullify, in good conscience, any
>law they see as bad law. This may seem a radical recommendation, yet when
>the American Constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel wrote: 
>
>"We cannot, by total reliance on law, escape the duty to judge right and
>wrong... There are good laws and there are occasionally bad laws, and it
>conforms to the highest traditions of a free society to offer resistance to
>bad laws, and to disobey them."
>
>                he was not talking about Russians, or South African, or
>Chinese citizens resisting the bad laws of their nations, but Americans. If
>juries were to be cowed into supporting bad laws here in America, (and who
>will deny that we have a few such bad laws on the books), we would be far
>more guilty of a travesty of justice than when such a thing  happens in
>another country: by its very insistence that it is the most democratic of
>nations, America must be held to a higher standard than other nations.
>Ultimate power must therefore not only reside with the jury, it must be seen
>to do so. I am suspicious of any court, and especially of Mr. Cabranes who
>would "categorically reject" jury nullification, no matter how forcefully
>they might invoke the principle of "rule of law."
>
>Sincerely,
>        Peter Webster           email: vignes@monaco.mc
>
>
>
>

========================================================================
Paul Andrew, Mitchell, B.A., M.S.    : Counselor at Law, federal witness
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