>I do not think it is too paranoid to claim that there are many interest
>groups in the US who would like their own villains unpunished - corporate
>executives, militia and white supremacists, right to lifers, tax evaders and
>so on. I do not think that anyone on this list would want these folks to be
>able to "jury nullify" the laws prohibiting corporate crime, hate crime or
>intimidation of people seeking birth control and abortion. But the
>consequence of this is that "our" villains (drug dealers or the assassins of
>school masters ;) should not be exonerated in the same way either, no?
>
Well, I never said anything about the assassins of schoolmasters. As for
the examples you give -- they don't actually fit the case. After all,
are you ever going to get a dozen corporate executives to sit on a jury?
NOT. Same thing with right-to-lifers and white supremacists. In point of
fact, these people have had a much bigger impact on life in the U.S.
through political manipulation than they could sitting in a jury. The
jury system, when it's not rigged, brings together twelve disparate
people and conjectures that, were they to agree, it would be a
significant and weighty event.. After all, in the jury system, even one
person, can prevent an evil being done.
I think it's the combination of your self-conscious, think tank diction and your fear/contempt for the masses that leads me to believe you have no faith that the common people can collectively exhibit any kind of wisdom or intelligence, whereas in fact they can and do, given half a chance. If this were not the case, the state would find a way to have more jury trials, not less.
Remember: I come from Eastern Europe too. I am very familiar with our flavor of elitism and contempt for the great unwashed, and I tell you it's wrong.
I am entirely sensible to the social harm that can be wrought by drug addiction and desperation; but a mugging won't make me into a conservative. After all, the Capitalists mug me every day and it hasn't turned me into a conservative yet :)
Your morality for the poor irks me. Put all the poor people and their purported violence together and it wouldn't add up to a minute fraction of what the United States has wrought in Iraq in the last dozen years.
Joanna
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