On Tue, 14 Nov 2006, John Thornton wrote:
> A friend just finished jury duty in Federal court and had a difficult time
> reaching a verdict. It was a drug case involving transporting meth. The
> problem she had was that she felt the police lied and tampered with some
> of the evidence to strengthen their case but that they did so
> unnecessarily. She believed the defendant was shown to be guilty even
> without the questionable evidence. Her question was basically whether it
> was acceptable to find a defendant not guilty, in spite of believing in
> his guilt, in order to punish the police for lying and altering evidence?
> I'm curious what others think they would do in a similar situation.
IANAL, but my position would be that the standard for criminal court is "beyond a reasonable doubt" not "preponderance of the evidence." And if you're convinced the police tampered with the evidence, then you have perfectly good grounds for reasonable doubt -- for all you know, the evidence that convinced you was simply more persuasively tampered with, and/or evidence that would unconvince you was conveniently lost.
Maybe I'd feel different with a rapist or murderer, but with a drug mule case I wouldn't hesitate to free someone on that ground.
Michael