Too many of the potential jurors said that even if the defendant, Elisa Meadows, was guilty, they were unwilling to issue the $500 fine a city attorney was seeking, said Ren Rideauxx, Meadows’ attorney.
So much time, effort, and resources wasted towards trying to fine someone $500 for doing something humane. Our “leaders” are out of touch with reality. Can we fine them for wasting our tax dollars on shit that doesn’t matter?
with “leaders”, the best course of action usually involves guilliotines.
You really believe that? I’ve had way too many conversations with people that generally support the mentality of the stick over the carrot.
My cousin, totally not super conservative or anything, just gen x, was talking about how Mike Tyson (I think) had said his son couldn’t box like him cause he didn’t know what it was like to be hungry. I was just like, is that important for us to have boxers?
Stop telling them this in advance! They can’t get at your work material or deliberations. Just give them a general affirmative and go on to nullify that shit.
Also, at the point you can’t seat a jury because they’re telling you they won’t convict there has to be some kind of slaughter rule. To stop wasting the court’s time if nothing else. Because at some point you’re just letting the prosecutor choose a verdict, not a jury.
Exactly. Well put
Don’t lie under oath, but you also don’t have to scream from the hilltops that the whole damn system is out of order and ensure that someone who is heavily invested in punishing the people for feeding the homeless gets your spot in the jury instead.
What the fuck did I just read?
Humans arrested and charged for feeding hungry and needy humans
That’s a level of Freedom ©®™ I just cannot comprehend
That’s fucking evil
You’ll fucking love this one then: Ohio pastor charged for opening church to homeless people in freezing weather
Welcome to America!
Home of the fuck you i got mine
Worse: they think they got theirs but didn’t. The group most likely to experience homelessness? Boomers. The group most entering the workforce? People over 75 years old.
An entire generation worked so hard to put their vision of the world out there but couldn’t see that they were destroying their own future in the process.
Somehow freedom morphed into Free Dumb.
Believe it or not, it used to be illegal in most places to be in public if you were maimed or deformed. We’re talking veterans will be arrested for walking down the street. The reason? Good christian folk suffer when they see it, it has to be kept out of sight.
This is the 20th century version of that.
Making me look up the source 😡
Had no idea that it was called that. The San Francisco law was specifically the one I was thinking of.
You’re breaking the money chain! Believe it or not, prison.
So the DA is just allowed to say, “I don’t like any of my choices in this jury pool” and that’s just okay?? That doesn’t sound like a fair trial at all. It’s like grabbing the stack of lottery tickets from behind the counter and starting to scratch them off. When somebody comes to make you stop you just say, “it’s all good. I’m just trying to find one I like before I decide to play the lottery today.”
The process of jury selection is complex. It good that it’s this way, however it can be abused if the system itself (meant to keep it working properly) breaks down. One of the most important elements in that is that the officers of the court (both lawyers and the judge) are operating honestly and in good faith.
So, you see the problem.
To over-simplify, as I understand things…
There’s a variety of reasons a juror can be rejected, with one of them being “the juror is not willing to follow the law, as written”. This seems to be what’s happening here, the law says that if a person does X, the penalty is fine Y, and these jurors are saying “I would not issue fine Y even if you prove they did X.”
To an extent, this is the system working they way it’s supposed to, one of the checks on unreasonable laws is being unable to find people willing to enforce them in good conscience.
Although that process can also be heavily abused, such as when all white juries would routinely find white defendants not guilty when they very obviously lynched black people.
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How simple can this be?
Could I convict someone for a victimless crime that helped people? The answer is yes. Yes of course I could. I could also have an affair, blow up my car, do a naked tap dance on my boss’ desk, tell my kids that I don’t love them, and finish the day trying to underwater basketweave.
If the laws of the physics does not prevent me from doing something the answer to the question “can I x” is yes. If the question is it likely well that is a much different story.
People have to learn how to jury nullify properly
Unfortunately this is a very cut and dry indication of intention of jury nullification, and that is a reason to dismiss a potential juror. They shouldn’t have said anything and then nullified once they actually got on the jury.
Not even intent, even the risk that someone has the ideological basis that could justify nullification in that case is enough to throw them out.
It’s actually why it took a while to prosecute the boston marathon bombers, because the jury selection ran face first into the fact that the jury pool was bostoners and bostoners lean pretty sharply against the death penalty, which is what the prosecutor was after.
Both parties get a certain number (like 2 or 3) chances to excuse anyone, no reason required. Outside of that, you’re raising technical reasons to the judge and the judge does the dismissing. If the judge doesn’t buy the reason and the other party doesn’t object, they may just end up on the jury.
This makes sense to me, but I also think that you shouldn’t be able to dismiss the jury en masse more than once. Jury pools are what, 20-30 people? If they can’t find 12 people and/or set 1 doesn’t work out for some reason and the judge agrees, you get one more shot and either accept the hand you’re dealt or drop the case.
When something of similar scope happens to the defense they can ask for a change of venue, and if it’s granted that’s it. The trial proceeds.
This is picked up on elsewhere in the thread that basically this, itself, is a form of jury nullification. If the law is so bad that they can’t ever get a jury together to try a case, then that law is unenforceable and effectively nullified.
This sounds like an abstraction of a general “problem” in the system. If you set a law with consequences that no reasonable person would think is proportionate to the crime no jury will convict someone of the crime. It was a real problem back when the death penalty was too broadly applied.
One particular thing with the abortion ban debates that is overlooked is how common women killing children under the age of one used to be before birth control/abortion legality. In those eras courts (usually somewhere between 1850 and early 1900’s) had to put new laws on the books to lower their punishments well off of full murder convictions because juries would refuse to apply full murder charges broadly to the category because at some level they accepted it as kind of a natural but volitle reaction to misery beyond the control of the person that the juries were very empathetic towards because a woman’s lot being particularly miserable was an accepted social norm.
These “problems” have ways of figuring themselves out. If you can’t reliably find a jury you have to change the law.
Jury Nullification! Tell a friend, tell an enemy, tell everyone. Take back our country.
Yeah but pipe down about it during jury selection, they screen for us.
Weird how it works. The one time I got jury duty I was ready to nullify and got given a case where the accused was accused of a raping a 11 year old.
Hmm I don’t think I am going to nullify that particular law. Sounds like a good one to keep on the books.
They rejected me anyhow, guess the defense didn’t want a parent of young daughters on the jury for some strange reason
Whenever they call up jurors for drug trials where I’m at they’ll inevitably end up throwing out most of the pool because even trials related to legit scum who are peddling the life ruining stuff can be derailed by the Legalize it Campaign apparently
Just because you think the law is bad doesn’t mean you like criminals. They are unrelated. A morally good person can be a criminal, a shitty human being could always be following the law.
Nullify bad laws.
Yeah that’s the rub though, I don’t trust people to decide what the bad laws are given which ones they’ve done it for previously.
The bad laws that get nullified tend to be a lot less impactful than the good ones that get nullified,
The practical application of it historically has convinced me that nullification is something akin to the death penalty,
There are without a doubt cases where it ought to be applied, but I do not at all trust my fellow humans to be capable and consistent judges of those circumstances.
I don’t trust people to decide what the bad laws
Do you know how representative democracy works?
but I do not at all trust my fellow humans to be capable and consistent judges of those circumstances
Right but a civil servant in a black dress is trustworthy. Like for example Clarence Thomas.
First, that assumes I don’t think judicial review is a crock of shit, which I do
Second, the legislative process of changing the law with a large body representing the broad national political crossection of opinions regarding how the law should change is far more legit than a bunch of Idaho’s good ol’ bois getting to decide they rather don’t care for the notion of enforcing a law that would prosecute a man for raping a 12 year old because “oh well he’s from a good family! We don’t wanna ruin his life now do we‽”
Yeah but here’s the thing, if they can prove you knowingly steered the jury towards nullification post selection they’ll prosecute you for perjury because the screening questions basically total up to “Would you nullify a guilty verdict? Yes or No?”, so doing it on purpose and being too obvious about it can get you put in front of your own jury.
Which is why you stick to the facts. Dispute them.
Testimony? Witness is lying.
Forensics? You think it is pseudoscience.
Footage? Photoshop, easy to do.
Confession? Given under duress.
It isn’t that hard to be a cynic. Just spend some time on the internet.
Too many jurors… don’t know about jury nullification.
This actually is a great example of jury nullification. From https://fija.org/library-and-resources/library/jury-nullification-faq/what-is-jury-nullification.html talking about a different case:
Of 27 potential jurors questioned during voir dire, only five said they would vote to convict a person of possession of such a small amount of marijuana. Skeptical that it would even be possible to seat a jury, the judge in the case called a recess during which time the lawyers worked out a deal known as an “Alford plea” in which the defendant didn’t admit guilt.
When these kinds of rejections of enforcement of laws stack up over time, the laws become unenforceable. We’ve seen this rejection of the Fugitive Slave Laws and alcohol prohibition, for example, undermine such laws’ enforcement. Eventually, it is no longer worth the time or hassle or embarrassment for government officials to try to enforce these laws. They may be further nullified in a sense either remaining on the books but not being enforced or being repealed altogether.
So when these potential jurors said they wouldn’t fine someone for feeding the homeless, it’s one brick in the wall. Get enough bricks and all of a sudden the law is unenforceable.
This is an excellent writeup, thank you.
To get there they’d have to risk being charged with perjury since it sounds like they were directly asking that question.
Only if they could prove it
I always wonder what they’ll do if I start chatting about it with other people during the selection process.
From what I understand it depends on the jurisdiction. Some places nothing happens, other places they’ll declare a mistrial and select from a new jury pool. Yet others they’ll slap you with a charge of contempt of court or possibly jury tampering.
Everyone should know about Jury Nullification.
Put me on the jury. If the city can make a convincing case that permits are needed to ensure safe food handling practices are being followed, and that permits are granted freely when reasonable requirements are met, they’ll get their fine (they won’t).
So what happens if they just can’t find anyone willing to say the fine is okay?
It’ll probably get dismissed. You have a right to a fair and speedy trial (6th Amendment) as long as you don’t waive the speedy trial which happens and is why some people spend years in prison without a trial…and probably plea out eventually.
When people want to know what anarchism is, it’s this organization. In many places where it operates it isn’t legal, but what good is the law when it stands between people and freely feeding their community.
And if you don’t have a local chapter and want to you can just start your own. There’s like four rules and you don’t need to get approval, from anyone. It’s completely decentralized. Hell you can operate one across the street from another.
Humanity prevails
LOL the city leaders are so desperate to act out their cruelty and cannot understand that the citizenry is capable of human empathy.
I mean most of them aren’t inherently evil at least not more evil than they are lazy. I’m sure if they were given the chance to just ignore the homeless population they would much prefer that. But they’re wealthier constituents the business owners and the elite don’t like seeing the homeless people around and they don’t like the increased crime that comes with it. Having a homeless population around does have some ramifications. It does make a number of their constituents uneasy and they would be very happy to get rid of the problem.
They’re trying to make them more uncomfortable so they move on. It’s not a good answer it’s not a moral answer it’s not a right answer but it’s not just out of pure evil. Most of them anyway.
See, this is the shit American and Canadian cities waste time and resources on instead of actually helping people in need.
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The place this group chose to feed people was creating a nuisance and they were asked to move it elsewhere. They were given an acceptable place just a few blocks away, and refused to move. The story has been sensationalized to make it seem Houston is against helping the homeless.
Yeah, think of the property values. Move all the homeless a few blocks away and lower their property values until a developer buys up the whole block and then push them somewhere else. Rinse and repeat.
More like blocking the sidewalk and spilling out into the streets right in front of the main library and city hall, so please move a couple of blocks to a parking lot.
I dont think that’s the full story?
and in Houston, they’d been doing so outside Central Library downtown for roughly two decades. In 2012, the city passed a law against giving free meals to people in need without permission, but Mayor Annise Parker’s administration gave permission to Food Not Bombs. That position was reversed by former Mayor Sylvester Turner.
Right. People complained about the library location blocking the sidewalk, so they were asked to move. The city in no way is against feeding the homeless.
