Occasional Notes: A Little Late to Early Modernity
Jason Kuznicki on Jan 31st 2008
Early Modernity: I love McSweeney’s. I have the sense that I would find this hilarious, in a Foucauldean sort of way, if only I’d watched more television.
French Librarians: Is this true? “After he had published la Méditerannée, Braudel went into the Bibliothèque Nationale and applied for a library card. He was handed a short form to fill out. Under “Nom,” he wrote “BRAUDEL, Fernand”; under “Métier,” he wrote “historien.” He was turned down. He then wrote The Structures of Ordinary Life.”
Duck Churches: Here’s one, for starters, via Blingdom of God — sure to be a new favorite, I think. Of course, the few readers who go waaay back will recall a duck church of our own.
Splogs: We’ve gotten a lot of links from Splogs lately, so much so that Technorati is becoming useless for tracking genuine incoming links. They’re all random text, possibly Markov chains, possibly gleaned from the web itself. One currently running is “Worst Witch Movie.”
Which witch move would that be? I nominate Return from Witch Mountain. In fact it may be the worst movie ever made. (And yes, I’ve seen Plan 9 From Outer Space.)
Ain’t Democracy Grand? I vaguely remember seeing something like this from the last presidential election. I’m so glad that typographers only get one vote per person.
Ain’t Trial By Jury… Grand? I agree with RadGeek: I would never, never vote to convict anyone on a nonviolent drug charge. I only object to RadGeek’s implication about minarchists: We aren’t all about to send someone up for ten years on a pretend crime and then look back at it dispassionately as an “interesting” experience.
Nope, before sitting on a drug jury I’d at the very least declare my views openly. Then let them find some other stooge to do their dirty work. If the drug warriors neglected to ask me about this during voir dire, or if they somehow seated me anyway, I would make sure that the process ended in a mistrial. You can have your injustice, I suppose, but I won’t be complicit in it.
Side thought: Can we get significant number of people to pledge never to serve on a jury in a nonviolent drug case? Could we maybe make this into some kind of a mass movement? It would be one way to register very publicly our disdain for the drug war. If we didn’t publish a membership list, we’d also be able to register our disdain before the legal system itself, whenever one of us was called to serve. Just a thought…
Filed in The Bookshelf, The Bureau
Return From Witch Mountain would have to be pretty awful to be worse than Manos: Hands of Fate.
I had the chance to sit on a grand jury in oregon during my last year of college there. one of the cases that came before us was a drug (pot) possession case where the DA was trying to charge two people with the possession of one bag of pot. i could not vote for the true bill as was charged due to my beliefs that only one person could really be in possession of the substance. needless to say, the remainder of the jury voted for the true bill. however, the next day, the DA came back to us to amend the charge because he had reviewed more case law and found that i was, in fact, correct that under oregon law (at that time) only one person could be charged. my point is this- the legal system has many flaws and having conscientious jurors empaneled can help to reduce those flaws (i have other examples of these flaws if anyone is interested)
btw- serving on that jury as the foreman was the most incredible thing i have ever done. if any of you ever have a chance to sit, please do but also do so with an open mind and with an eye towards justice
Jury issue:
But, see, this is one of the principal problems I have with the way our jury system works. It’s a jury of our “peers”, right? Whatever that means, OK. But then it’s pared down: if, say, 40% of my peers think I should not be locked up for smoking weed, why on EARTH is that 40% excluded (”for cause”) from judging my case?
I understand that the point is that the jury is not supposed to judge the law, but judges the defendant against the existing law. I understand that the answer is supposed to be to fix the law. But, well, if it’s 60/40 in favour of locking up folks who are high on pot, the law stays… and that means that the JURY gets to be 100/0 in favour of locking up folks who are high on pot, at least as a general principal.
What chance does that sort of selection give a defendant?
No, I’m sorry; that’s a broken system.
Jason,
Thanks for the link and the reply.
I recognize that there are minarchists more radical or principled than Dale Franks, who would have refused to collaborate in a drug conviction. I have other problems with their position (after all, I’m not a minarchist), but not the problem that I have with Dale Franks. I didn’t mean to imply that every minarchist would have done what he did.
However, I do think that it’s fair for me to suggest that being a minarchist makes one systematically more likely to indulge in that kind of legalistic error than one might otherwise be. Being an anarchist has built-in intellectual safeguards against it, whereas being a minarchist doesn’t. (That’s not intended as an argument for anarchism over minarchism per se; rather it’s why I think that this case and others like it go to support my prior argument that people who have already been convinced of anarchism for other reasons should be cautious about how closely they work with smaller-government campaigns or institutions.)
As far as drug trial juries go, I would happily lie about my political views in order to get on the jury, and then, if I got on it, do everything in my power to obstruct or prevent a conviction. I think that the prosecutor in a drug case has no more moral entitlement to get the truth from me than the Gestapo would if they stopped by to ask whether I’m hiding any Jews in my attic. And while the pay scale for sitting as a juror would be shitty compared to what I could be making for my time in other pursuits, I’d be happy to give up the profits in order to help an innocent person go free.
I had a commenter, a Harvard law professor I believe, who commented on jury nullification, an issue about which I have thought little. He seemed to imply that the Framers wanted juries to have a say, perhaps the major say on whether a law is constitutional. If done for no reason, I think jury nullification has the potential to subvert the rule of law. However, if a law or the prosecution of a law violates the Constitution, why shouldn’t “the people” on the jury have a say on constitutionality, just as the three other branches of government do (the legislature decides when they write the law into being; the executive gets to veto unconstitutional laws, and the courts practice judicial review; this just gives another party the opportunity to nullify laws that potentially infringe on liberty).
A friend of mine in grad school was in a jury pool. When the DA asked if anyone believed in jury nullification, he raised his hand. And was promptly shown the door.
To me that always seemed to suggest that the DA didn’t have much faith in the legitimacy of the laws he was enforcing.
RadGeek –
You make good points all around. I’m not sure whether anarchists have more of a safeguard, but you may actually be right.
The tradeoff for me is as follows: Do I want to risk jail for perjury in order to free someone else from jail for marijuana possession? My sentence could well be worse than his, and I’m not sure the added righteousness would make it pass any faster. I have a life to live, after all.