Sunday, December 05, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Can we vote our conscience?

As if planning to affix Radio Frequency ID "scanner" tags to medication bottles (so they can be picked up at airports, etc.) wasn't bad enough, the government now wants to share your records of personal prescriptions for anxiety, depression, insomnia, and pain with ... the cops.

According to the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, a bill before Congress, The National All Schedules Prescription Electronic Reporting Act (HR 3015), has been passed by the House and is being considered by the Senate.

"While masquerading as a law enforcement tool to help control the illegal use of painkillers, the national bill would ... create a central database affecting tens of millions who are not even suspected of a crime," the AAPS warns. "And the information will be shared with state and local law enforcement."

See www.aapsonline.org/alerts/nasparalert.htm

• "I would like to thank you for your book, `Send in the Waco Killers'," writes M.K. of Syracuse, N.Y.

"I have recently been summoned and empaneled for grand jury duty in Syracuse. I am going to request a jury kit from the Fully Informed Jury Association but was wondering if you could refer me to any other references.

"I asked the D.A., which was probably a waste of breath, if we were to consider the law as well as the facts. He said just the facts, the judge will give you the law; the court is not the place for political expression. Exactly what you said (I'd be told) in the voir dire chapter of `Send in The Waco Killers.'

"I pointed out that it was rather queer that the commissioner of jurors introduced us to our role as jurors with a video highlighting the Peter Zenger trial. It conveniently left out the part about the jury ruling against the law. Where is it in the law, so I can point to it, that the law is on trial as well? And how does this apply in a grand jury as opposed to other juries?"

I replied:

Ah, the judge will "give you the law." And here I thought we had a legislative branch to "give us the law." And they don't do it orally; they write it down. Will the judge let you read the law, from the state revised statutes? Why not? If the answer is that you, as a layman, couldn't understand the law, then the law is void, moot and should be treated as though it does not exist, based on vagueness and incomprehensibility.

I'm not a lawyer and I can't offer you legal advice. But even if I did, you're going to tell some $150,000 prosecutor in an $800 suit with an armed cop on either side of him that "some newspaper guy in Nevada told me you're wrong ..."?

My books and the FIJA folks (www.fija.org) have already provided you with dozens of court citations, from, "The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." (first Chief Justice John Jay, U.S. Supreme Court, 1794) to, "The jury has an unreviewable and irreversible power ... to acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge. The pages of history shine upon instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge; for example, acquittals under the Fugitive Slave Law" (U.S. v. Dougherty, 1972).

Yet you seek somewhere else where it's "written down in law" (so you can "point to it") that you're "allowed" to acquit (or refuse to indict) a fellow citizen who you believe had done no one any harm, but who is instead the victim of a malicious prosecution under a bad law that lacks 96 percent public support (the percentage at which the state has a 61 percent chance of conviction with a random jury.)

In a purely pragmatic sense, this ongoing "debate" with the authorities about whether you're "allowed" to vote your conscience can have only one result:

You will be removed from the jury, which will thereupon be stacked with a dozen stooges willing to swear in advance to ignore their consciences, and send a fellow citizen up the river to be butt-raped for a dozen years, even if they're convinced he did no one any harm, because, "Those were the judge's instructions."

A grand jury can investigate any official wrongdoing it pleases -- not just cases brought before it by the state prosecutor. But will they tell you you have that right and power? Will they "allow" you to do it? Or will they dismiss the whole grand jury and start again if you "go out of control"?

You've got the wrong party doing the "pointing," here. Things are not made legal because it says so in law. Everything starts out legal, and only becomes illegal when it's outlawed. In writing. (Even then, a law can't take effect if it violates the Constitution.) Where in the law can they "point to" the place that says jurors can be prosecuted or punished in any way for voting their conscience, setting free a fellow citizen who they believe has done no harm, no matter what any other laws say? Make them "point to it."

There can be no such law, of course; it would be null and void on its face for violating the right to a trial by a jury of your peers as guaranteed in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments.

We live in a (budding?) police state. Good little citizens are conscripted down to the courthouse under threat of arrest to go through the motions of rubber-stamping and tying nice red ribbons around their atrocities against a generally peaceful people -- atrocities which seem all the more normal because they indulge them daily.

You must now decide whether you're willing to go along, or whether you're going to resist, and if so, how. And no one else can tell you what to do. Good luck.

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the forthcoming "The Black Arrow."