John Adams kicked it off, and Woodrow Wilson’s craven politics represented a moment where the country could have moved in an awful direction.
It’s unfortunate that we live in an era where many people have mastered the art of mass manipulation. We’re in an era where we’re vulnerable to the same sort of grinding warfare that WW1 became, and the information landscape is a barren one full of propaganda and junk.
Fun fact: Wilson resegregated the entire federal government and even went so far as to show a KKK propaganda film at the White House. The guy was a rabid racist.
Additionally, Wilson had a stroke that left him blind and paralyzed in 1919 and for the remainder of his presidency his second wife and doctor manipulated him so heavily that there is serious debate as to who actually was in control of the White House during those years. Some historians call Edith Wilson, his second wife, America’s first female president the manipulation was so effective.
He left half the members of the court, the people who later convicted him, in tears.
Full speech here: http://www.emersonkent.com/speeches/address_to_the_court.htm
I think to hear him tell it, he was already in prison.
The judges are all crooks and liars and will make you pay because you didn't "respect my authority" (read in the voice of the petulant child, Eric Cartman from the cartoon show South Park).
In fact, I feel like I am doing something illegal just by typing this. We cannot win in a court of law. They will simply replace us if we show them any brain activity.
You must reach a unanimous not guilty verdict, not because of jury nullification but because you genuinely believe the defendant is not guilty.
> For the most part, the answer is no. You should NOT discuss jury nullification with your fellow jurors.
> It is well-established that it is perfectly legal for a juror to vote not guilty for any reason they believe is just. However, courts have also decided that they can remove jurors for considering their option to conscientiously acquit.
> This applies anytime until the verdict is officially rendered. Even as late as deliberations, if a disgruntled fellow juror decides to tattle on you to the judge, you could be replaced with an alternate juror. We recommend not openly discussing jury nullification during deliberations.
> https://fija.org/library-and-resources/library/jury-nullific...
All normal disclaimer applies. I am not a lawyer. I anal. Yada yada.
Generalizations like that are not helpful, I am not a lawyer and I won in court with judge, he reversed his own ruling because I've proved he was wrong based on Supreme Court rulings.
They do not take kindly any effort to disrespect them. Remember, a court of law has authority because we as a society gives them this authority. Since we don't live by divine rights of kings, they do not have any claim to authority other than through us, the people. This is the very foundation of our democracy. I agree that usually this is inflammatory language but in this specific case, you must walk into court assuming they are out to get you if you discuss jury nullification.
Once again, this is not legal advice. I anal.
Yes you are, pooper, yes you are.
Jury nullification is not some divine right, it’s an unintended consequence of jury secrecy. It’s like going into a job interview at Twitter, and just talking about how everything is exploited by bots, and then you just complain about how you aren’t allowed free speech on the platform. Who would hire you?
Wait, bad example.
The reason people try to discourage “jury nullification” is because if a law is unjust, it should be removed, not be in place for certain juries to give _some_ people passes.
The law should be the law. If you allow juries to decide to give “innocent” verdicts even if someone broke it, then congrats you have made a system where the jury gets to decide randomly if they want to enforce something.
This is the world we live in though. Imagine telling someone who is facing life in prison "tough luck but we need to fix the law first".
1. Congress is pretty much deadlocked and has been for decades.
2. This guy, Michael Flynn[flynn], received a presidential pardon.
3. Prosecution routinely uses its "discretion" on which cases to bring forward and what charges it wants to recommend. Police / law enforcement uses its "discretion" as well.
If there is any justice, either this guy should serve his full sentence or we should immediately release anyone and everyone convicted of "lying to federal agents[making false statements]" from prison declaring the insane law null and void.
[flynn] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Flynn
[making false statements] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements
White college girl has weed, jury nullifies. Black unemployed guy has weed, jail.
I replied elsewhere but to tl;Dr what currently happens is:
White college girl has weed, no charges pressed.
Jury nullification, of a sort, actually dates back to England. One of the pressures that diminished the penalties for theft (which had crept up to "death") was that juries, seeing a young man in the box with their whole life ahead of them whose only crime was taking from some unaccountable rich boffin, found themselves unwilling to toss the man in the gallows for taking from one who had plenty.
Upon seeing this pattern emerge, the London merchant class panicked and petitioned the king to lower the penalty, lest no crimes against them be punished at all.
Yeah but by the time a person is actually on trial, trying to change the law that they are facing is probably too late, isn't it? And the system is slow and is dominated by the rich and powerful subset of society, so trying to change the law may not work anyway.
>If you allow juries to decide to give “innocent” verdicts even if someone broke it, then congrats you have made a system where the jury gets to decide randomly if they want to enforce something.
To some extent, this will happen one way or another. If I was on a jury, I would not vote to convict someone for breaking a law that I dislike. And a jury is already random in the sense that it's a somewhat random selection of 12 people who may have wildly different levels of intelligence, concern about the law, emotional states, and so on. To some extent, a jury decides randomly in every single trial whether they want to enforce something. The way I see it, informing people about jury nullification just helps to potentially win back some power for what myself and those I care about.
Isn't that jury nullification? That's the exact thing I am saying, shouldn't happen.
White college kid is caught with intent-to-distribute amount of weed, jury allows them to walk away even though they are guilty.
Black kid is caught with intent-to-distribute amount of weed, jury decides to enforce jail time this time.
I mean what harm would it do?
Please try to understand from my perspective. I am trying to say the privileged won't even see trial. If you are especially privileged, it won't even matter if you get convicted. See the case of Michael Flynn.
Jury nullification cannot make the situation worse. All it can do is expand the pool of people who won't have to suffer.
Remember, Congress is deadlocked. I have no hope that we will get sensible repeals like repealing the nonsense "making false statements is a felony" [false].
[false] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements
> Making false statements (18 U.S.C. § 1001) is the common name for the United States federal process crime laid out in Section 1001 of Title 18 of the United States Code, which generally prohibits knowingly and willfully making false or fraudulent statements, or concealing information, in "any matter within the jurisdiction" of the federal government of the United States,[1] even by merely denying guilt when asked by a federal agent.[2] A number of notable people have been convicted under the section, including Martha Stewart,[3] Rod Blagojevich,[4] Michael T. Flynn,[5] Rick Gates,[6] Scooter Libby,[7] Bernard Madoff,[8] and Jeffrey Skilling.[9]
This is the stupidest law I've ever heard of in my opinion. To convict someone, you have to know they were lying. If you can independently verify they were lying, how did their lying hurt the case? Law enforcement just needs to do its job and not have stuff just handed to them in a silver platter. Remember though, this common sense repeal will not happen in our lifetime. What recourse do you have left?
However I’m not a fan of jury nullification, as it’s a violation of the juror’s oath. I agree jurors individually can in practice give their verdict as they see fit, but advocating openly for others to violate their oaths is another thing.
We can talk all about how jury nullification allows the jury to dismiss unjust laws, but do keep in mind the oath a juror is required to swear:
Do you and each of you solemnly swear that you will well and truly try and a true deliverance make between the United States and ______, the defendant at the bar, and a true verdict render according to the evidence, so help you God?
Aside from that problematic bit, is that oath performed before the jury hears the case or just before they deliberate?
I’m asking because the details of the case may themselves reveal an unjust law that the jury may feel obligated to decide against.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I struggle to see a charitable interpretation. It looks a lot like a thinly veiled attempt to push a pro-communism anti-establishment narrative. But it comes apart at the seams because to anyone that objectively cares about free speech, every Communist country has been far worse at it than the US. For that matter, you could just as easily have said that WW1 was ended, in part, by US military action.
Its one thing to have a political opinion, but your comparisons are dishonest and the way you slip it in as "just a historical observation" is even more dishonest.
He might just be pro-labor but not pro-communist.
I don't know much about Russia, Germany certainly has given Lenin a train ticket so that he could participate in that revolution, because they thought that it would help their interests. But for Germany, the theory that Germany lost the war because of the revolution is the so called "Dolchstoßlegende", a right wing conspiracy theory. Germany has already lost the war before that revolution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth
The sailors were not cool with that and decided to not be killed on the final stretch of a pointless war
That was the final straw and was used to kick of the revolution. The monarchy already had lost most of its authority by that point.
This was fascinating and amazingly conniving.
The Churchill quote, saying Lenin was smuggled back into Russia "in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus" is quite the imagery.
Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale covers it well.
"in part" saves you there. Otherwise it's nonsense.
WW1 was certainly not ended by the October Revolution. If anything, it made the war 10x worse, by freeing German troops for Ludendorff's 1918 offensive, which almost succeeded.
The Kiel Mutiny? Maybe accelerated the end by a few days. The Germans were already seeking an Armistice.
> certain kinds of political speech were never really protected
Adams and Wilson were indeed villains here. Lincoln suspended *habeas corpus." Roosevelt sent Japanese-Americans to the internment camps.
Was it the right decision, or did it end up losing more lives in the long term? Whole other discussion.
There was a Russian Civil War, which we don't hear much about. So the war hadn't really ended for them. There was also a war between Russia and Poland.
I looked some for a total of "WW I casualties by year" table but didn't find one; only "casualties by country." The significance would be "giant German offensive; therefore giant casualties."
In any case, I don't think there's much of a case for the hypothesis "Russian Revolution saved lives."
It is also disingenous to call Russian revolution a "Labor action", since it was performed first by army generals and members of ruling class, then by political exiles-in-return.
122,000 killed, wounded, or captured. And that was just one battle.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Tannenberg-World-...
The Russians lost 30,000 killed or wounded, while the Germans sustained a total of only 13,000 casualties. Some 92,000 Russian prisoners were taken, two and a half army corps annihilated, and the remaining half of Samsonov’s army severely shaken.
Moreover it has mostly uprooted the surviving rest of society.
That trauma has dwarfed WWI and almost erased it from public memory.
When it comes to politics, in particular, WW1 is remembered precisely because it led to a revolution, and it was very obvious and explicit in the revolutionaries' rhetoric; one of the most famous slogans was "штыки в землю", literally "bayonets into the ground".
It's mostly forgotten in the US, for that matter. I think the last living veteran of that war died recently. Peter Jackson's recent cleaning up of the movie footage for "They Shall Not Grow Old" https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7905466/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1 was heart-rending.
Even I hear of Women's Death Batallions for the first time. Need to google.
> by labour action: the October Revolution in Russia
Calling Russian revolution a "labour action" is like calling WWI "a brawl between some German and British lads". Technically, part of it fits this description, but one can't but notice it doesn't exactly paint the correct picture. Also, Russian revolution didn't really end the war - rather, Russia was losing badly, which in part led to the regime collapse, which made Russia sign the peace and get out of the war which it could no longer fight. The war didn't end by it though.
And to remember that WW1 was ended, in part, by labour action: the October Revolution in Russia, and the Kiel Mutiny in Germany.
The full speech is here: https://genius.com/Eugene-v-debs-anti-war-speech-annotated