On Wed, 23 Dec 1998, Anonymous wrote:
Is there a good web site where I can find other legal means to recuse myself (I live in AZ), or if I do decide to report and get on a trial, a web site on my rights to vote my conscious, aka jury nullification?
If you really do want to avoid jury service, mentioning FIJA or jury nullification ought to do the trick - it may get every juror within earshot excused, too, depending on how paranoid the locals are. But I think that's a horrible idea - jury participation is an opportunity to exercise much more influence than you wield if/when you vote in an election. All by yourself, voting your conscience as shaped by the evidence and the jury instructions, you can force a mistrial, which might or might not mean the end of the case. If your view of the evidence and your understanding of the law, as explained by the judge in the jury instructions, proves to be persuasive to your fellow jurors, you will collectively make the law as it applies to the parties in your trial. It's pretty difficult to overturn a jury verdict - not impossible, but it's harder than you might think from watching TV. Jury duty is, correctly understood, yet another of the "checks and balances" of the US legal system - if the legislators and judges are doing things with the law that the citizens don't like, don't support, or even just don't understand, it's an opportunity for those citizens to peacefully change the situation. Unfortunately, the jury duty process tends to select against people with the backbone to think for themselves; and people with backbone and strong principles often self-select away from jury service, because the bureacratic mechansims which surround it are confusing, annonying, and sometimes humiliating. If you can look beyond/around that, it's an opportunity to participate in the distributed creation of law and justice, which is a pretty big deal. Cypherpunks serve on juries? -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@netbox.com