April 24, 2004 -- The most powerful vote cast by an American today is not necessarily the vote placed in the voting booth, but rather the vote cast in the jury deliberation room.  A juror does have the power to challenge and change laws.  As the United States Supreme Court has previously stated, “The pages of history shine on instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge…” [U.S. vs. Dougherty, 473 F 2^nd 1113, 1139. (1972)]

Yet today’s judges instruct juries that they do not have the right to judge the law; that they only have the right to judge the evidence presented at trial. We the people should meet this type of governmental oppression with fierce resistance.  The truth is that the only power government has over the jury is the individual juror’s ignorance of their right to exercise conscience regarding the law.

As long as jurors have a conscience, they have a God-given right, as well as a patriotic duty to find a defendant guilty or not guilty, not only based on the evidence or lack there of, but also on the individual juror’s moral and ethical belief about the law, as well as the pending punishment associated with the law(s). Considering the potential punishment for a defendant is relevant to a juror, particularly because of the sometimes-harsh mandatory minimum sentencing requirements that have been established by our lawmakers.  For more and more criminal offenses, lawmakers have made sentencing nothing more than a rubber stamp process, thus neutralizing jury discretion, as well as all other mitigating factors.  Sentencing has become dehumanized.   Consequently, our prison system is now overburdened with non-violent and mentally ill inmates.  The cost of mandatory minimums is absolutely enormous to taxpayers.

Mandatory minimums are evidence of politicians selling out to special interests, and further demonstrate the government’s assertion that we the people cannot be trusted to uphold their laws.  To perpetrate mandatory minimums, the government frequently and wrongfully instructs juries that the defendant’s potential punishment cannot have any bearing whatsoever on the jury verdict.   Additionally, the government will not inform the jury of any mandatory minimum sentencing requirements that are associated with a particular offense.  Sadly, the outcome of this government deception is that many jurors often leave the experience of jury duty feeling bewildered and betrayed.  When a jury learns after the fact that a defendant will serve ten to twenty years in a dangerous penitentiary for committing a non-violent drug-related crime, many are shocked and outraged.  Jurors often proclaim that they simply had no knowledge of the mandatory minimum sentencing requirement, and if they had known about it, many jurors say that they would have found the defendant not guilty.   As such, if a juror is convinced that the punishment for a crime committed is excessive and a demonstration of government oppression, then all jurors who hear such cases have a responsibility to find all defendants that are faced with such harsh punishments, not guilty.

Our founding fathers understood that it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges and draconian laws.  As such, they created an independent judiciary, while insisting upon further protection against arbitrary action. Providing an accused with the right to be tried by a jury of his peers gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt, overzealous prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge.   The jury trial provisions reflect a fundamental decision about the exercise of official power--a reluctance to entrust plenary powers over the life and liberty of the citizen to one judge or to a group of judges. Fear of unchecked power found expression in the criminal law in this insistence upon community participation in the determination of guilt or innocence.  Yet the government claims that jury nullification, jurors judging the law as well as the evidence, leads only to lawlessness; that the government must be able to control with laws, the freewill of the people.  If the government controls freewill, then we are no longer free people.