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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: 7259
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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Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 44.
#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.
Jury-nullification notices should be required in jury instructions. I've been on a jury twice (I've also been a plaintiff, a defendent and a witness) and know all about FIJA; we voted guilty in one and not guilty in the other, but I was prepared to inform fellow jurors about our power and duty to judge the law as well as the facts, had that been an issue. WE judge in a jury trial; the guy in the black robe is just a referee.
So 12 random citizens should write the law based on the sob story and circumstances of one defendant. Obviously the prosecutor who brought the case didn't think an exception was warranted. Jury nullification bothers me because we're resorting to the rule of man over the rule of law -- different laws for different people depending on their ability to emotionally, not factually, sway the jury. If the law is bad or unfair, re-write the law. Sway the citizens with your arguments and have them put pressure on their legislators. But that's too hard, isn't it? And you might fail. So you prefer going in the back door on a case by case basis, letting the some of the guilty go free while incarcerating others under the exact same law. How about when all- white juries in the southern states refused to convict whites of crimes against blacks? That OK with you? How about today when black juries refuse to convict black men of crimes against whites (OJ comes to mind)? That OK with you? How about if the jury decided that the individual did not break the law as written, but the individual violated the spirit of the law and therefore voted to convict? That OK with you?
Juries cannot in any circumstance create law. In the case of nullification, they only hold a form of veto power over the implementation of a law in a particular case. Juries are not professional legal analysts or lawyers. They represent the common people who apply a common sense viewpoint of laws that defendants are charged with breaking. The case of William Penn made it obvious that regardless of what you may thing of whether Jury Nullification is something Juries should do, because they cannot be punished for any verdict they reach, it is a de facto power they must be recognized to have. Any complaint you raise about how a jury might rule, even if unfairly guilty in convicting an innocent man because of race, is also something a single robed jurist can do as well. At least with a jury it requires all 12 to agree to reach an unfair racial verdict. If you want a perfect world in a court room, you won't find it. If the views of common people should not be a factor in deciding someone's fate, then you should campaign against having them involved in the courtroom process, and just use a computer to decide guilt and innocence. (I'm sure you'd be fine with that, given your attitude). Yes, the "back door" method may be what it is, but not all back doors are secret passages. Jury nullification allows the common people, represented via random selection of views, to check the power of laws created by the normal political process. There's nothing inherently wrong with that and, in addition, it's again on top of the fact that it's impossible to deprive juries of that power anyway. Robed judges have the power to set aside a conviction of a racist based verdict, but not convict one the jury has acquitted. Improper convictions can also be overturned on appeal if the judge is racist as well.
If it were that cut and dried, the prosector would refuse to bring charges, figuring he'd never get a jury to convict. Or the case would be plea bargained and never go to a jury trial.
Yes, of course. If a prosecutor felt that juries usually nullify in particular subject matter, they will be less likely to attempt prosecution, which saves court fees, court time and so on. Cops likewise, knowing that a prosecutor is unlikely to prosecute for a type of crime, are less likely to arrest for those same offenses for similar reasons. That's exactly what happened to prohibition. Of course, this doesn't happen in the case of a single nullification case, but only when it's a repeating pattern, which is a signal that the vast majority of the public disagrees with a certain prohibition, as nullification requires unanimous consent.
#47. To: Pinguinite (#44)
Towards the end, yes. "which is a signal that the vast majority of the public disagrees with a certain prohibition" True, but Prohibition was not repealed because of jury nullification.
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.”
#4. To: misterwhite (#3)
(Edited)
So his lawyer told them about jury nullification and got away with it. She's lucky I'm not that judge.
#25. To: Hank Rearden (#4)
(Edited)
Jury-nullification notices should be required in jury instructions.
#33. To: misterwhite (#25)
So 12 random citizens should write the law based on the sob story and circumstances of one defendant. Obviously the prosecutor who brought the case didn't think an exception was warranted.
If the law is bad or unfair, re-write the law. Sway the citizens with your arguments and have them put pressure on their legislators. But that's too hard, isn't it? And you might fail. So you prefer going in the back door on a case by case basis, letting the some of the guilty go free while incarcerating others under the exact same law.
How about when all- white juries in the southern states refused to convict whites of crimes against blacks? That OK with you? How about today when black juries refuse to convict black men of crimes against whites (OJ comes to mind)? That OK with you?
#42. To: Pinguinite (#33)
They (the jury) represent the common people who apply a common sense viewpoint of laws that defendants are charged with breaking.
#44. To: misterwhite (#42)
If it were that cut and dried, the prosector would refuse to bring charges, figuring he'd never get a jury to convict. Or the case would be plea bargained and never go to a jury trial.
Replies to Comment # 44. That's exactly what happened to prohibition.
End Trace Mode for Comment # 44.
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