Here is the last (at least temporarily) installment looking at the misstatements contained in the brochure circulated by the proponents of the Judicial Accountability Initiative Law (J.A.I.L.). This one won’t be quite so long because it was somewhat recently explored on this blog.
The brochure says:
Q: If I serve on a jury, can I be sued by a criminal that I help convict?A: Another ridiculous scare tactic. The opposition can’t come up with any valid reasons for opposing Amendment E, so they resort to ludicrous claims like this. In a criminal case, a juror’s sole responsibility is to vote guilty, [sic] or not guilty. This limited involvement in the judicial process precludes a juror from having the ability to violate anyone’s rights, therefore Amendment E would not apply to a juror.
Yet another flagrant lie as demonstrated by the language of J.A.I.L. itself.
According to the initiative, a judge is anyone who can claim judicial immunity. As I’ve previously noted, the U.S. Supreme Court has said judicial immunity extends to individuals, such as jurors and witnesses, for acts taken in the scope of their duties when participating in the judicial process. Thus, a juror (or a witness) falls squarely within J.A.I.L.’s definition of who can be stripped of immunity. After all, even the brochure admits the jury is part of the judicial process.
The J.A.I.L.ers argue, though, that the jury has “limited involvement,” being asked only to vote whether a person is guilty or not guilty. (Actually, in civil cases they aren’t asked that but whether one party is liable to another). Yet in making that determination, the jury not only listens to the evidence, it evaluates it and has the power to determine whether to reject or disregard certain evidence because they believe it unreliable or false. Yet J.A.I.L. says a person entitled to claim judicial immunity (a juror or a witness) can be stripped of that immunity if they engage in “deliberate disregard of material facts.”
Let’s say the defendant in a rape case testifies at trial that the event never happened and, in fact, he was not even in the same city at the time in question. Certainly, that would be “material facts” for his case. If the jury convicts him, he plainly has a basis to invoke J.A.I.L., asserting the jurors deliberately disregarded material facts in reaching their verdict.
Once again, we find J.A.I.L. lying about what this ludicrous amendment actually does. If J.A.I.L.ers are truly interested in accountability, maybe they should be accountable for what they’re trying to foist on the public instead of continually misrepresenting it.
Trickery and treachery are the practices of fools that have not the wits enought to be honest.
Benjamin Franklin
