From: Anonymous <nobody@replay.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Sep 1998 21:14:58 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: Jury duty considered harmful, or at least rare
Message-ID: <199809250216.EAA02681@replay.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



On Tue, 22 Sep 1998, Rabid Wombat wrote:

> On 24 Sep 1998, Anonymous wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, 23 Sep 1998, Tim May wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > At 11:11 PM -0700 9/22/98, Bill Stewart wrote:
> > > 
> > 
> 
> > If they do have a list, I'd kind of like to be on it. I'm a college
> > student, and I _can't_ serve on a jury for more than a day or so. The same
> > goes for doctors, corporate executives, and others.
> > 
> 
> Yeah, right. I *never* blew off class to go to the beach. I never go to
> "meetings" on the golf course, either. Glad to hear the only people with
> important places to be are doctors, executives, and college students. 

Maybe you skipped class all the time. Maybe you didn't have to compete to
get into a competitive graduate school or graduate from that school. Maybe
you hold your "meetings" on the golf course and cheat your company. I
don't. That isn't the point.

Glad to hear that you make a habit of blowing off class and playing golf
on company time. 

Snip. 

>  Oh, and I need
> > to still get my full salary to pay my bills. Thanks, buddy." Um, no.
> > 
> 
> The company I work for pays our salary while we are on jury duty. We have 
> to turn over the $3 a day stipend.

That's nice for people who work at your company. It won't work for a small
business where the juror own and operates it. It also won't work for a
small business owner to hire more help and still pay the juror, because
then it's cheating the owner.

The court system summons the people under penalty of law. The court system
puts them on a jury. The government isn't repealing all the bullshit
legislation. The government can pay the bills. Can't afford it? Maybe we
should redirect some of that welfare money. 

> Most defendants are guilty. That doesn't mean the one in front of you is. 
> Take traffic court as an example. How many defandants are there because
> they are innocent, and the cop was mistaken, didn't calibrate his radar,
> needed to fill his quota, etc.? A few. How many are there because they
> want a couple points knocked off the penalty, even theough they were
> speeding? Most of them. A guilty defendant is entitled to a fair trial. So
> is an innocent one.  You don't help the process by ducking jury duty (or
> are you one of the stupid people?). 

That's primarily because of all the bullshit laws and legal events we
have: drug laws, computer crime laws, frivolous lawsuits, set-ups by the
cops, ITAR/EAR, and other things along that line of thought.

The last time I was called for jury duty was back in college, where they
got me in the week of finals. Of course, they hit me on that day, so I
have to jump through all sorts of hoops and seriously piss a couple of
professors off. Nothing keeps those professors from giving somebody like
that a harder final either, under the pretense that they might have talked
to others in the class about what the questions and answers were, which
means that their grades relative to others in the class are then skewed,
but the curve is still applied to them. Repeat with similar situations for
any profession which isn't like canning at a tomato sauce plant.

How many people do you think are found guilty because 11 people in the
jury think he should be, and 1 person in the jury thinks the law shouldn't
even be there but lets it go because the other 11 people on the jury don't
understand the concept of jury nullification, they all just want to go
home and not keep losing their livelihood, it *is* the law no matter how
unconstitutional it may be, and the offense is relatively minor anyway?