On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 05:46:20PM -0800, Bill Stewart wrote:
At 05:02 PM 1/12/2014, Jim Bell wrote:
... Authorities, no doubt, would want to label this 'jury tampering'. <http:///>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_tampering However, it is likely that if no actual 'offer' is made to a specific juror, and 'everybody' simply KNOWS that these payments will occur (due to prior advertising and other publicity, and because other jurors have always been paid in the past), this should not run afoul of such laws.
Of *course* they'd want to label it 'jury tampering', because it *is* jury tampering. It's an offer to bribe the jurors to acquit somebody they might otherwise convict. It directly runs afoul of jury tampering laws, and the only difference from traditional jury tampering is that it *might* be easier not to get caught.
I do prefer it to some other traditional kinds of jury tampering, including the one where the government only allows prosecution-friendly jurors, and the one where the payment for acquittal is "not getting your legs broken". (The latter, btw, also has some anonymity built into the payment mechanism, since it's easy to deliver the payment anonymously to jurors who accept.) But they're all perversions of justice.
I think some sort of "fund the campaign of the first politician to succeed in making said illegal behavior legal" is far more likely to have the desired results. I would argue that politicians are far more predictable than jurors, and then it's pretty clear you are making a free speech/change the law payout, rather than do something most people would think is shady. (Okay, most people think buying politicians is shady, but that feels like a much easier public relations game to win than bribing jurors) Anonymity is expensive, and if you can change the game to do what you wish publicly, and transparently, I expect it will cost a heck of a lot less per successful outcome. Lots of lawyers will publicly advertise services for campaign engineering. Very few will *publicly* advertise services for jury tampering.