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Title: Georgia man grows pot. Admits it. Jury sends him home
Source:
WSB-TV Atlanta 2
URL Source: https://www.wsbtv.com/news/local/ge ... -jury-sends-him-home/799784904
Published: Jul 27, 2018
Author: Bill Torpy for the AJC
Post Date: 2018-07-27 16:13:24 by Hondo68
Keywords: Jury Nulification, respect for the law, this was about fairness
Views: 6185
Comments: 64
DUBLIN, Georgia - This article was written by Bill Torpy for our investigative partners at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and AJC.com. Javonnie McCoy was growing marijuana when the cops came to his middle Georgia home. He was caught red-handed with it. Almost a pound of it, in fact. He admitted it to police, and later he looked jurors in the eye and said, "Yep, it was mine. I used it as medicine." The jurors let him go. He was minding his own business and wasn’t hurting anybody, they reasoned. He just doesn’t belong in prison. The jury’s decision earlier this month in Dublin, Georgia, may have been due to a muddled prosecution of a muddy case. Or it may have been jury nullification, another case of citizens saying prosecutions for pot are not worth law enforcement agencies' time and effort -- or the impact on otherwise law-abiding people’s lives. It was the second such win in the Laurens County circuit for Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard, a conservative Republican who’s also a staunch civil libertarian. Late last year, another client of hers fessed up to a jury that he had sold a couple of nickel bags to an insistent undercover drug cop. That client was cut loose after just 18 minutes of deliberation. And this is no liberal soft-on-crime region. Donald Trump won the county 2-1. Bernard also helped get North Georgia authorities to drop charges against the parents of a 15-year-old whose parents allowed him to smoke pot to help combat severe seizures. Ultimately, what may have kept McCoy out of an orange jumpsuit was that his lawyer urged the jury to empower themselves. She told them they are not potted plants or an unthinking arm of government. They, in fact, are the government. She read to the jury a section from the Georgia Constitution that says, “The jury shall be the judges of the law and the facts.” Bernard said the judge chided her for bringing that up, but it seems the words sank in. The case started when police were called to McCoy’s mobile home four years ago. McCoy’s half-brother had allegedly attacked him with a stick and McCoy grabbed his .22-caliber rifle, the one he uses to hunt squirrels, and shot his sibling in the shoulder. Police found several potted plants in McCoy’s bedroom and tagged him with several charges including aggravated assault and manufacturing marijuana, a felony that can bring 10 years. The case stalled in the system and McCoy decided to go to trial. Right before the trial, the state dropped the assault accusation but kept the pot felony charge. (Prosecutors did not respond to my messages.) McCoy was offered eight years’ probation, Bernard says, but chose to fight the case. During trial, McCoy decided to testify. He had little choice. He was caught red-handed. He said his attorney told him, “Talk to them. They will connect with you.” He gulped and sat in the witness box, telling jurors that 15 years ago he was mugged and beaten into a coma. He has suffered migraines and depression and ended up self-medicating with pot “because Zoloft turned me into a zombie.” Prosecutors “tried to make it look so bad, that I was selling it. But I had nothing to hide,” McCoy told me, explaining his decision to testify. “The jurors had their eyes on me. I had my eyes on them.” “Marijuana makes you eat,” McCoy told the jury. “It made me feel calm. It made me relax. It helps with my pain.” He is a country guy who lives by “hustling” -- painting, landscaping, selling fish, driving people to the store. Ultimately, he said, “We had a jury you could relate to. Truck drivers, mechanics, construction. People who worked. They saw I wasn’t bothering nobody. That’s what I believe they felt.” Bernard said she doesn’t coach defendants before testifying because juries pick up on that. “I think they appreciated his honesty.” People in Dublin have respect for the law, Bernard said. But this was about fairness, about properly using law enforcement resources. “In America we leave someone alone if they are not bothering somebody,” Bernard said. “A world where he needs to be dragged away by armed men and put in a cage is not a world where people want to live.” She doesn’t like the term jury nullification. “It brings up a negative image. It’s simply part of being a jury. The jury judges the law and the facts.” Denise de La Rue, a jury consultant not involved in this case, said, “Jurors are really interested in justice. There are often cases of no loss, no foul. There’s no real victim here.” That’s pretty much what the jurors said. A couple said the case presented to them by prosecutors was a mess because the lawyers had to avoid talking about the shooting. In fact, the jurors I spoke with never even knew the missing charge involved a shooting. Two of them said “second chances” also played heavily into their verdict. Lizzie Mae Davis said, “He was believable. He wasn’t trying to make money. He had it to ease his health.” Davis said she really has no problem with people using pot — “as long as they’re not around me.” Juror Brian Loyd said of the verdict, “Sometimes good things happen to good people.” Kenneth Thompson, who works in construction, said jurors liked that McCoy was “forthright.” Ultimately, they decided, the man didn’t deserve to get tossed into the slammer. “If he’s disrupting the peace and dignity of the state, well, a lot of us said he wasn’t bothering anybody,” Thompson said.
Poster Comment: Libertarians are winning in Georgia. A waste of taxpayer dollars paying cops to bust people for victimless crimes. Fire them, give out tax rebates, and a tax cut too.
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#10. To: hondo68 (#0)
And, she is beautiful.
In Georgia, jury nullification in Georgia dates back to the 18th Century. What Justice Jay was saying is that citizens, not the judge or the police, have the right to say that a law is either prima facie unjust, or unjust in the application of the case at hand. 2) The requirement that indictments specify that the alleged crime was "against the good order, peace, and dignity" of the state of Georgia—and that jurors don't necessarily see all illegal acts as anything of the sort. 3) Georgia jury instructions specifying that, if jurors have no doubt as to guilt, they are "authorized" to convict, but if doubt exists, jurors have a "duty to acquit." “Jury nullification” is a term used to describe the phenomenon of a seated petit jury deliberately refusing to convict a criminal defendant, following a trial, despite evidence and legal instructions adequate to support a conviction. “Nullification” connotes the jurors’ decision to disregard the factual evidence of guilt, the applicable law, or both, to set an accused criminal free even though the law has technically been broken. Is jury nullification good or bad? The topic has long provoked controversy, with strong feelings on both sides. Modern-day proponents of nullification have devised a more palatable moniker for the practice, dubbing it “jury veto,” or “jury independence,” or the exercise of a “fully informed jury.” (In fact, a national organization based in Montana, the Fully Informed Jury Association, promotes the cause of nullification.) The terminology used, however, does not resolve the underlying philosophical dispute over the proper role of the jury. Most courts actively discourage the circulation of pro-nullification pamphlets in front of courthouses by FIJA activists, believing that it encourages jurors to violate their oath—taken at the beginning of the case—to consider only the evidence presented and the instructions of the trial judge. In the courts’ view, jurors play an important but limited function: to sift through the evidence (especially conflicting testimony) and apply their factual findings to the relevant legal rules, which are determined elsewhere. Jurors are not lawmakers. When juries step out of that limited role—and instead act as the ersatz “conscience of the community”—bad things can happen. In the Jim Crow South, all- white juries frequently acquitted defendants accused of lynching blacks and other heinous crimes—not because the evidence was weak, but out of sympathy for (or in solidarity with) the defendant. Conversely, in the O.J. Simpson case, the predominately African American jury arguably engaged in nullification in 1995 when it acquitted Simpson of murdering his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman, despite what most observers felt was overwhelming evidence of Simpson’s guilt. More recently, many Americans were outraged when a San Francisco jury—possibly motivated by nullification—acquitted Kate Steinle’s killer. There are many other examples. On the other hand, nullification is celebrated by many libertarians, including Ron Paul, who view it as a laudable “p opulist” check on the enforcement of unjust or excessive laws (sometimes referred to as “overcriminalization”), prosecutorial overreaching, and even overly- aggressive police officers. Proponents include Radley Balko, the Cato Institute (which has published a pro-nullification book), certain elements of the militia movement, the Tenth Amendment Center, and law professors such as Glenn Reynolds and Ilya Somin. Proponents argue that the practice dates to the refusal of an English jury to convict William Penn for unlawful assembly, a charge that was a transparent pretext for restricting his freedom of religion. Proponents also cite later examples of Americans refusing to convict defendants charged with violating unjust laws such as the Alien and Sedition Act and the Fugitive Slave Act. In recent times, proponents advocate nullification in cases involving “victimless” crimes, such as possession of medicinal marijuana. Some proponents assert that the Founding Fathers contemplated a broad role for juries, entitling them to judge both the facts and the law in any particular case. There is an element of truth to this claim. In the early American republic, the legal system—at least in some states—reflected what legal historian John Phillip Reid calls “a laical jurisprudence” controlled by laymen, not lawyers or judges. During the 19th century, however, virtually all jurisdictions abandoned this practice in favor of the current system of judge-led trials. Accordingly, modern trial practice sharply restricts jurors’ discretion, requiring them to swear under oath that they will follow the courts’ instructions. It is difficult, therefore, now to argue that jurors act nobly by violating that oath and defying the law. Critics of jury nullification include Orin Kerr, who contends that it “is a recipe for arbitrariness instead of informed judgment.” Robert Bork deemed jury nullification a “pernicious practice,” and saw it as a manifestation of a larger trend: “individualism in the law,” or “the substitution of private morality for public law and duty.” I agree with both criticisms. Objections to unjust laws (or overcriminalization) should be taken up with the legislature, to effect change, or raised in legal challenges to the constitutionality of the objectionable laws. I wrote an essay on jury nullification over 20 years ago, in The Freeman, entitled “Nullifying the Rule of Law,” opposing nullification, and my position hasn’t changed. My primary objection to nullification is that it leads to the disparate application of laws, which is antithetical to the rule of law. As I argued in 1996: And what is a jury acting outside of the law but a 12-person mob, like modern-day vigilantes? Although the jury-power activists point to historical events where juries refused to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, there is no assurance that a jury operating outside the law would only acquit in a criminal case; it could just as easily “nullify” the instructions by convicting a person who was technically innocent. . . . Furthermore, nullifying the law strips the individuals who comprise society of their right to have the laws enforced. Nothing could be more tyrannical or despotic than the arbitrary decision of a jury that has rejected the law. I continued: The rule of law is essential to the preservation of liberty. Friedrich Hayek, perhaps this century’s pre-eminent theorist of classical liberalism—the political philosophy of freedom—believed that the defining characteristic of a free society is the rule of law, meaning legal rules stated in advance, uniformly applied, without excessive discretion. In Hayek’s words: “[W]hen we obey laws, in the sense of general abstract rules laid down irrespective of their application to us, we are not subject to another man’s will and are therefore free.” Thus, it is the universal, non- selective nature of law that allows us to be free. In Hayek’s view, it is precisely because judges and juries cannot pick and choose what laws to enforce in a particular case “that it can be said that laws and not men rule.” I am surprised that those who support jury nullification are not more sensitive to the Hayekian principle being compromised, and the potential for abuse. In our system, laws are democratically enacted and apply to everyone. No one is above the law. As I argued in The Freeman, renegade jurors who ignore their instructions are scofflaws, “no more heroic than a rogue policeman violating the law or a politician accepting a bribe. If a juror (or any other member of the political community) feels that a particular law is unjust—and in a society as large and diverse as ours, we can assume that someone, somewhere, feels that every law on the books is unjust—the remedy is to petition the legislature for reform, not to infiltrate the jury and then ignore the law.” The debate over jury nullification highlights the differences between libertarians, some of whom are “minarchists” uneasy with the constraints on individual autonomy inherent in the state, and classical liberals, who view civil society as indispensable to secure their liberty. Fundamentally, laws are necessary to preserve a free society, not—as libertarians suppose—inherently symbols of abject coercion. Freedom is not possible without the rule of law. Conceptually, jury nullification— selectively suspending the law—is “anarchy in a microcosm.” As a classical liberal, I view it as brazen lawlessness and a prescription for arbitrariness. Mark Pullman.
Funny, that aspect is never brought up.
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Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestIt was the second such win in the Laurens County circuit for Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard, a conservative Republican who’s also a staunch civil libertarian.
#12. To: buckeroo, Everybody (#10)
(Edited)
It was the second such win in the Laurens County circuit for Atlanta attorney Catherine Bernard, a conservative Republican who’s also a staunch civil libertarian.
It was no-brainer wins for her because the Georgia Constitution made it so easy for her wins since the Georgia Constitution specifically allows for jury nullification. “In criminal cases, the defendant shall have a speedy trial by an impartial jury; and the jury shall be the judges of the law and the facts. Article I, Section 1, Paragraph XI."
So we clearly see that jury nullification is legal in Georgia. In Georgia v. Brailsford 3 U.S. 1 (1794) Chief Justice John Jay stated: “It is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumed that courts are the best judges of law. But still both objects are within your power of decision… you [juries] have a right to take it upon yourselves to judge both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy".
Bernard had three advantages when she defended Mr. McCoy: 1) The actual language in the Georgia constitution, describing juries as judges of the law and the facts.
Is jury nullification: good or bad?
#28. To: Gatlin (#12)
"... there is no assurance that a jury operating outside the law would only acquit in a criminal case; it could just as easily “nullify” the instructions by convicting a person who was technically innocent. . . ."
Replies to Comment # 28.
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