IRS loses a big one?

[Bill Stewart]

Nah, just a small loss.  It's good to beat them, but hard to repeat,
and they're playing a numbers game.

There are good points and less good points to jury trials.
One of the good parts is that a jury can acquit you for any reason
that they want to, if you can convince them to.

On the other hand, jury verdicts don't set precedents the way
judge verdicts can, and jury verdicts of Not Guilty
can't be appealed, so there's no way to get them escalated
to a wider area, unlike a judge's declaration that
a law is unconstitutional, which applies to whatever territory
that judge has jurisdiction over (whether that's a city
or a Federal District or whatever), though they're useful precedent.

That doesn't mean that winning with a jury isn't a Good Thing :-)
But in particular, even a fully-informed jury that's judging the law
is normally just judging how and whether the law applies to a
particular case, and most jury decisions are really about
the facts of the case or at most how the law applies to those facts.

This jury decided that the IRS had failed to prove that
Kuglin violated any laws about what papers she had to file
or how she had filed any that she did file.
That doesn't mean that she doesn't owe any taxes,
or that the IRS can't find a way to get money from her,
such as garnishing her wages in the future,
or even that any papers she did file were correct -
only that the IRS had failed to prove they were punishably wrong.
(It doesn't even necessarily mean that the way she handled
her papers *wasn't* punishably wrong - only that the IRS
didn't give a sufficiently convincing argument that
the laws their lawyer likes to quote apply to the actions she took
or didn't take in the way that the lawyer contends that they apply.)

In particular, based on the two newspaper articles,
it sounds like the IRS mouthpiece was saying that
Kuglin could and should have had a conversation with them in which
they'd have explained to her exactly where it says she had to
file things their way, and that she'd failed to do so and
was therefore a Bad Person who deserved to be Punished,
when in fact she'd sent them several letters which they'd failed to
respond to so it's their problem that the conversation
didn't go the way they wanted it to.
But hey, must've been some clerk's fault, sorry about the mistake.

The IRS did lose, which it doesn't like to do,
and it may have to find some way to salvage this case
or try to bury it, and probably a few more people will be inspired
to try to do what Kuglin did, and 10% of them might do it competently,
some percentage of them will do it incompetently and get Punished
and possibly made examples of, and most will get lost in the noise.

Me?  I'm not protesting taxes, I'm protesting MS Windows,
but I gave up on getting the disk with my TurboTax on it to boot again
and scragged the data onto floppies using a rescue disk
so we can reinstall onto another system and finish my taxes before the
August 15th extension deadline :-)

(I'm also protesting the Wintel PC Architecture -
I can't get the box to boot from CDROM reliably enough to
reinstall Windows or run Knoppix, even after replacing the CDROM drive,
and it doesn't like to see the new hard disk drive as a slave
when I've got another hard disk as master.  And this year's
[expletive deleted] Turbotax DRM probably won't let me
rerun the return without paying them a second time
because the keying info is stashed in the Registry,
which isn't accessible from a DOS rescue floppy...)

                 Bill


At 07:49 AM 08/12/2003 -0700, Steve Schear wrote:
>[Not surprisingly there appears to be no major U.S. media coverage]
>
>IRS vs. KUGLIN
>By Carl F. Worden
>
>Forget the war in Iraq, Afghanistan and our excellent adventure in
>Liberia. Forget about Kobe, Arnold, Arriana, Scott and Laci. The
>biggest news of the entire week is that on August 8, 2003, the IRS
>was unable to convince a jury in Memphis, Tennessee that the Federal
>Tax Code requires the citizens to pay individual income taxes. I kid
>you not...
>
>http://www.sierratimes.com/03/08/10/ar_IRS_vs._KUGLIN.htm
>
>also
>http://www.newsmax.com/insidecover.shtml
>
>A foolish Constitutional inconsistency is the hobgoblin of freedom, adored 
>by judges and demagogue statesmen.
>- Steve Schear