Jury nullification

In a democratic system, laws are created by the people as a means of maintaining order. Unlike in a police state, where compliance to laws is arrived at by using the force of the state security apparatus, democratic societies can only maintain their open nature because of voluntary compliance based on the belief that the laws are just and should be followed. This voluntary compliance is obtained because we believe that we ourselves are the architects of the laws that govern us.

But how do these laws come about?

We are all familiar with how the process works, at least on the Schoolhouse Rock level. We, the citizens, vote legislators into office. These legislators propose bills. Once passed by the legislature and signed by the elected executive, these bills become laws. So we tend to think that we, the people, have created the laws that govern us through the medium of representatives elected to act on our behalf.
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Jury refuses to convict man who gave food and water to migrants

I wrote recently about how the US Customs and Border Protection agency had been destroying water stations left by humanitarian groups in the desert to prevent migrants dying from dehydration. After one of those groups No More Deaths had publicized these horrendous actions by the CBP, the US government arrested one of its volunteers Scott Warren because he had provided migrants with water, food, clean clothes, and beds in a barn. He faced up to 20 years in prison.
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Sometimes a sandwich is just a sandwich

Recall the case of the man who was prosecuted by the federal government for throwing a sandwich at a CBP agent. Yesterday, he was acquitted by a jury.

There was no doubt as to the facts of the case. Sean Charles Dunn flatly said, “I did it. I threw the sandwich.” It was clear that the government tried to make the case into a warning to anyone to not show disrespect to any of its ICE or CBP thugs, after a viral video of the incident made them a laughing stock.

A grand jury in DC declined to indict Dunn in August on a felony assault charge, but he was eventually charged with a misdemeanor. The case moved ahead in federal court, with US district judge Carl Nichols acknowledging the strange case and saying the trial would be short “because it’s the simplest case in the world”.

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The Scott Warren acquittal and providing sanctuary

I speculated that the acquittal of Scott Warren for giving aid to the people crossing the desert regions on the US southern border was possibly a case of jury nullification, the process by which juries acquit someone who is guilty on the facts because they feel that the law is unjust or should not have been applied in that case. Ryan Devereaux of The Intercept says that what happened with Warren was not jury nullification but the government being unable to make the case.


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CBP wants retrial of Scott Warren to omit mention of Trump policies

Readers may remember the case of Scott Warren who was arrested and charged for providing food, water, clothing, and shelter to weary undocumented migrants who had undertaken the dangerous trek over arid and barren land on the southern US border. The trial resulted in a hung jury that refused to convict him. Of course, the Customs and Border Protection agency has decided to waste time and money by retrying him.
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Atheism going mainstream?

At one point in his inaugural address, Barack Obama started using familiar language in calling for national unity, saying “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus,” but the ears of atheists everywhere perked up when he added at the end “and non-believers.” Could this, along with the most recent Pew survey that indicates that the influence of religion in America is waning, be a sign that atheism is going mainstream?

The fact that neither Obama nor the Chief Justice was perturbed by the absence of a Bible when he repeated his presidential oath privately because of flubs in the original public ceremony (and no one on Obama’s staff seemed bothered enough to go and hunt one down) lends credence to my belief that for many public figures, religion has played largely a ceremonial role, a façade for public consumption, rather than a true belief. It is like standing for the national anthem. How many people stand at home when the anthem is played at some televised event? As philosopher John Stuart Mill said in his 1873 autobiography, “The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.”
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