United States News
See other United States News Articles
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: 7221
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.
Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 30.
#3. To: hondo68 (#0)
Bernard said the judge chided her for bringing that up, but it seems the words sank in. So his lawyer told them about jury nullification and got away with it. She's lucky I'm not that judge.
Yeah America is lucky you aren't in charge of anything. John Jay said it is the jurors duty to judge law and fact. Since you don't know much about the constitution. I'm pretty sure you never heard of John Jay.
Mark Pull man said:
I also know that statement is pure bullshit.
I also know that statement is pure bullshit. Maybe it’s bullshit….and then maybe it’s not We must remember that the Constitution is definitely a LAW and it is considered the SUPREME LAW of the land, according to which our country will work. If jury nullification is okay and it acts like a “kangaroo court, to NULLIFY a LAW in that the jury ignores recognized standards of law or justice granted under the Constitution, while intentionally disregarding LEGITIMATE LAWS and judicial authority established by the Constitution, then the a jury can NULLIFY the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution which is of course known as the Bill of Rights. A jury can do this by acting under the guise of JURY NULLIFICATION. A jury can’t nullify the Constitution? The Constitution is a LAW and under jury nullification a jury can nullify a law….any LAW. Right? Think about it … And while you are thinking about it…reflect on the old proverb: “There is no such thing as being half pregnant”. Back to this: Can’t it?
Can’t it? You bet. People like jury nullification because it allow the people they like to "beat the system". But what happens when a jury decides your right to carry a handgun is not protected by the second amendment and votes to convict? Or the jury ignores the instruction "beyond a reasonable doubt" and uses the standard, "He probably did it"?
#35. To: misterwhite (#30)
It CAN happen and most probably WILL at some time, under jury nullification. If California cities CAN be sanctuary cities and California CAN be a sanctuary state….then a jury CAN take away your Second Amendment rights. Most libertarians love jury nullification, occasionally there is a smart one among them that does not. A while back, at our local libertarian discussion group, we spent an evening discussing centralization vs. decentralization of government, and whether one or the other better protects individual liberties. Many libertarians argue for decentralization. The anarchists in the room will argue for the ultimate decentralization, all the way to the individual level, essentially voiding the concept of government altogether. Others who are more amenable to some government argue for decentralization because it tends to allow for competition, with citizens voting with their feet and wallets for more favorable tax and regulatory regimes. On the other hand, the US provides historical examples of the benefits of federalism in protecting individual rights. Certainly the abolition of slavery and later of Jim Crow laws were a positive outcome from the feds, as are the enforcement of Bill of Rights protections on the states. I would personally love to see a federal system like our own with all legislative power held as locally as possible, but with a federal government whose main purpose domestically was not taxation/regulation/legislation but instead enforcement of a more robust Bill of Rights and nullification of state and local law that violated protected individual freedoms. Anyway, one topic related to decentralized authority was j ury nullification. Jury nullification is the ability for juries to rule on the law, rather than guilt or innocence. An example might be "the jury thinks Joe is guilty of smoking pot, but we don't think smoking pot should be illegal, so we are going to let Joe go." Most state law technically does not allow juries to rule on the law itself, but as a practical matter there is no way juries can be prevented from doing so (Prosecutors really go non-linear over jury nullification -- I remember Patterico had a long series inveighing against it.) Anyway, as you might imagine, the libertarians in the room mostly love jury nullification. Despite being a good anarcho-capitalist, I disagreed. I understood that most of the examples people brought up did indeed demonstrate that jury nullification could be a tool for protecting individual rights. However, I believe that nullification could equally be a tool of oppression. For example, in criminal law, take the Enron-Skilling trial. I am not saying this happened, but one could certainly imagine a properly inflamed jury saying "well, we don't think he is technically guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on the charges based on the evidence here in court, but he's rich and Enron failed and people lost money and we're pissed off, so we will find him guilty. They would be saying "what he did was not a violation of the law, but it should be, so we are sending him to jail." This is just as much jury nullification as my previous example. I don't think this kind of anti-individual-rights jury nullificatin happens often in criminal court, but I do think it is happening a lot in civil court. In fact, I think one way you could summarize what is wrong with torts and litigation in this country is that we are seeing rampant jury nullification in favor of wealth redistribution. Juries are ignoring the law, the facts of the case, and all reason for one and only one consideration: "One guy in the room is rich, one guy is not, and I have a chance to take money from the rich guy and give it to the poor guy." For while it may be hard in America to get 51% of the voters to support substantial increases in wealth distribution, smart lawyers like Peter Angelos and Jon Edwards have figured out that it is not that hard through voi dire to get at least seven or eight such votes in a room of twelve people. Particularly if you are good at venue-shopping: In Race, Poverty and American Tort Awards (and here), Eric Helland and I show that tort awards increase strongly with county poverty rates especially with minority poverty. A 1% increase in black poverty rates, for example, can increase tort awards by 3-10 percent with a similar increase in Hispanic poverty rates. Careful forum shopping can easily raise awards by 50- 100%. Anthony Buzbee, a famed plaintiff's attorney, inadvertently let the That venue probably adds about seventy-five percent to the value of he case," he said. "You've got an injured Hispanic client, you've got a completely Hispanic jury, and you've got an Hispanic judge. All right. That's how it is." In other parts of Texas, Buzbee went on, a plaintiff may have the burden of showing "here's what the company did wrong, all right? But when you're in Starr County, traditionally, you need to just show that the guy was working, and he was hurt. And that's the hurdle: Just prove that he wasn't hurt at Wal-Mart, buying something on his off time, and traditionally, you win those cases." The problem with letting juries write law in the jury room is that there are no Constitutional protections at all. If they want to make the law, at least for that day, read that homeowners are liable for inj uries suffered by burglars trying to break into their house, then that is what the law becomes, fair or not. If they want to make the law read that drug companies sh ouldn't sell painkillers that have any risk at all, then that is what the law is, and the rest of us 300 million minus twelve people have to live with fewer choices for managing our migraines.
Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/LatestShe read to the jury a section from the Georgia Constitution that says, “The jury shall be the judges of the law and the facts.”
#11. To: misterwhite (#3)
#13. To: A K A Stone (#11)
Is jury nullification good or bad? 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.
What say you?
#15. To: Gatlin (#13)
Freedom is not possible without the rule of law.
#16. To: A K A Stone (#15)
(Edited)
If the law is unconstitutional in my view not guilty 100 percent of the time.
I agree, if the law is unconstitutional. Freedom is not possible without the rule of law.
Is it now? Freedom is not possible without the rule of law.
If the jury can take away the Bill or Rights by jury nullification, and under jury nullification a jury can declare a law invalid so it can be disregarded….then without the rule of law, a jury can take away our freedom by nullifying the Bill of Rights under jury nullification
#30. To: Gatlin (#16)
(Edited)
If the jury can take away the Bill or Rights by jury nullification, and under jury nullification a jury can declare a law invalid so it can be disregarded….then without the rule of law, a jury can take away our freedom by nullifying the Bill of Rights under jury nullification
Replies to Comment # 30. But what happens when a jury decides your right to carry a handgun is not protected by the second amendment ...
This has been constantly on my mind throughout the discussions on this thread.
cat out of the bag recently when talking about Starr county in Texas.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 30.
[Home] [Headlines] [Latest Articles] [Latest Comments] [Post] [Mail] [Sign-in] [Setup] [Help] [Register]