That Slate article is over a year old. The Supreme Court recently clarified the issue in Yeager, finding that if you were previously acquitted on a crime, and it had overlapping elements with other charges, you couldn’t be retried for those either.

http://www.scotuswiki.com/index.php?title=Yeager_v._United_States

As SCOTUSwiki puts it succinctly, “In Yeager’s case, therefore, the Court held that the jury’s inability to reach a verdict on the insider trading counts in the indictment was simply a “nonevent,” entitled to no weight in the collateral estoppel analysis.”

conviction. 1. A belief that you hold or that holds you. 2. Many a man has the courage of his friends’ convictions. 3. Judges without conviction are the most generous in handing it out.

judge. 1. When a judge makes a mistake, it becomes the law of the land. 2. Judges and criminals are the only persons who take the law into their own hands. 3. Judges hand out sentences on the theory that it is more blessed to give than to receive.

judgment. What this country needs is not more judges, but more judgment.

jury. 1. Twelve men chosen to decide who has the better lawyer. 2. A group of twelve people of average ignorance. 3. The only thing that doesn’t work right when it’s fixed. 4. A group of persons that should have the courage of its convictions.

justice. 1. Something that is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest. 2. It is well that justice is blind; she would not like most things done in her name if she could see.

There’s a huge paper trail around any trial, so there would be more than enough hard evidence to go through. If it appears that the prosecutor acted in good faith they should be acquitted (though ideally still put away for 18 years under the weird ruling described above) but if they’re found to have wilfully manipulated evidence to misguide the jury then they serve a custodial sentence.

Of course, if we used the current lawbook as a blueprint then the mere fact of being a prosecutor would be de facto proof of guilt, but that’s a different story.

“I don’t care what the law says. That’s not a crime. Not guilty, and we can stay here until Hell freezes over or Lawyers and Judges deserve Heaven. Though that second one might take a while.”

Is holding hope for significant legal reform any different than holding hope that government may reform itself? Is this really any different than going to the voting booth where your vote is likely to not really have any meaningful effect? Are we not subscribing to the “Myth of the Rational Legal System.” (sorry Mr. Kaplan.)

The crux of government, and law to a degree, is it truly benefits only those who willingly participate while the burden of the costs are carried by those who do not receive any material benefit even if they are the supposed beneficiary. Laws that stray beyond the scope of person and property are nothing but the idle desires of one man imposing his ethics on another by a force we are dutifully bound to with nothing more than an irrational hope that one day we might find a social contract that respects individualism.

Not so sure anymore. Perlhaqr wins the thread.

My bet is that the charge was money laundering. Not taking money across state lines. Otherwise internet purchases wouldn’t be legal in most cases. There is a law that if you take more than a certain amount of cash out of the country you have to declare it. So it could be something in regards to that too.

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I actually don’t try to avoid jury duty because I like to think of myself as one of the few reasonable voices unwilling to be spoonfed the prosecution’s theories and charges. At the beginning of deliberation, there were only two or three of us who thought the drug charge was BS, and we brought everyone else around in just a couple hours. I know it’s a small victory and probably meaningless in the big picture, but it felt good.

I have not followed up on the case at the end of the article yet. Should be interesting to see where the 6th came down.

This is a direct contradiction to a relatively recent Supreme Court decision which stated that federal mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines are voluntary, on the basis that they obligated the judge to consider facts not found by a jury. The sentencing guidelines violated the defendant’s Constitutional right to a jury trial, which these cases seem to do as well.

I’m honestly not sure what to make of that decision. That the guidelines are voluntary would seem to indicate that judges are still free to follow them, after all. IOW, they still have discretion re. sentencing and can still hand out rather absurd sentences if they want–they just aren’t any longer required to do so.

I’m not sure it’s so different. A judge may give you a longer sentence because they find you personally offensive. You were never convicted of that, but there it is.

Sure, judges can consider a lot of things, which justifies giving them a range for each type of conviction. But in the aforementioned case, the judge went well beyond the typical range for powder cocaine convictions and into the range of crack cocaine (which is ridiculously several times higher) solely due to facts not found by a jury – on a fact that the jury not only didn’t find, but acquitted the defendant on.

This is a direct contradiction to a relatively recent Supreme Court decision which stated that federal mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines are voluntary, on the basis that they obligated the judge to consider facts not found by a jury. The sentencing guidelines violated the defendant’s Constitutional right to a jury trial, which these cases seem to do as well.