Marc J. Wohler wrote:

At 11:19 PM 9/30/96 -0700, you wrote:

...

I'm glad you asked. I wouldn't pretend to have *the* answer, but rather than screw around with basic Constitutional enumerations, I think the "authorities" should have had the guts to challenge those cases (at least the most obvious ones at first, to get the ball rolling), by investigating and declaring mistrials based on some kind of jury manipulation which showed bad faith on the part of the locals.

Theory sounds great, but what if, as often was the case, the "authorities" were the major part of the problem.

I presume heirarchical authority. That's what we had in the U.S., even in the 1960's. The specific authorities running bogus juries were generally county-level. One could argue that the states, and by extension the feds, looked the other way as long as they could, and indeed they did. Once they could no longer look the other way, those higher-level authorities should have proceeded against the local governments as I specified, rather than undermining the Constitutional enumerations. If there should happen to be a good argument that the feds and states couldn't proceed against the locals because these higher-level authorities were somehow compromised (other than general scumbagness), I'd like to know how.