'Jury Booty' and Anti-prosecution tactics. (Was Re:)
Troy Benjegerdes
hozer at hozed.org
Mon Jan 13 12:37:27 PST 2014
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.
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