@22 – In Europe, typically the ECHR. Which is why the European right hate it so much.

I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and I know a police state when I see one. The US is definitely a police state. I’ve lived there a nice, comfortable life for 16 years, but about seven months ago I packed up and moved back to Europe. The No. 1 reason was that the US is dangerously coming close to the last stage of full police state conversion – abolishing the freedom to travel. TSA notwithstanding, the fact that passports can be now routinely taken away from some people (currently people who don’t pay child support and some felons, but this is just the beginning) is one of the best indicators that the US is turning into a nation-wide prison, Soviet style. I took the advantage while I still had my passport, bought a one-way ticket to Europe (actually, a return ticket because it was cheaper than one-way), sold of or moved all my property, and completely disassociated myself from the country I tried to hard to get into some 17 years ago. And all that because the Reason article, even though a little too late to the party, is absolutely right.

it is utterly outrageous. Any argument for why minors can’t consent to sex applies with even more force in this situation. The quoted law professor is ridiculous as well, or at least they way the quote is used. Essentially, “there’s no law on the books against it, so it’s ok.”

Realistically though, the entire exercise was to see which kids, if any, refused to give DNA or got squirmy about it, so they could focus on those kids more. I don’t think they’re actually gonna sequence an entire school.

I think you’re missing the point. It only counts if you manage to get on a jury and actually exercise your jury nullification powers. Otherwise you’d just be a blowhard taking an irrelevant stand and doing nobody whatsoever any good.

The Rule of Law is often favorably defined as the opposite of the Rule of Men, but that’s not quite right. Laws are products of men, and are as arbitrary as anything else men do. All rule is rule by men, and rule by terror. The real opposite end of the continuum from the Rule of Law is the Rule of Status, of which aristocracies and police states are closely related forms (one often develops out of the other, as in America’s case). American cops of today are much like samurai or knights; legally entitled to physically assault or even kill anyone of lesser status who insults their fragile egos, with whatever obligations they have in return for their privileged status being entirely directed toward their masters and patrons.

The whole point of this is to teach kids that they have no rights. Metal detectors, “resource officers,” drug dog sniffs, locker searches, vehicle searches, etc. The Constitution just does not apply in schools, and pretty soon it won’t apply anywhere else either.

So kids 4 to 9 years under the age at which they can consent to sex (in CA) are considered able to understand and consent to waiving their 5th Amendment rights???

While I agree that the purposes you suggest may be real, don’t be too quick to jettison the idea that the War on Drugs is about drugs. Mencken defined Puritanism as “the dreadful fear that somebody, somewhere, may be having a good time” and wrote that a significant part of the impetus for the passage of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) was the countryman’s resentment of the fleshpots of the Cities. I think there are significant numbers of people in Law Enforcement and the Legal/Political professions who have seen what drugs can do to addicts, and what addicts can do to those around them, and declared unlimited war on the scourge for respectable if misguided reasons. And I also think there are those who simply want to force others to do as they are told. You see the same thinking at work in the anti-smoking Crusade.

But I do also like the idea of jury nullification as it is a tool that the people can use to defend against the over-criminalization of our society, as well as prosecutorial abuse of power.

The last two criminal jurors I spoke with told me that their respective juries nullified.

In one case the jury didn’t think a folding knife that small should be illegal. So they nullified. They were acting in protest of the law.

In the other case, the tiny, embarrassed lady slapped her drunken troublemaking husband (who’s bad behavior had gotten the police called). Again, the jury nullified. In this case, I don’t think the jury was protesting the spousal abuse law, but rather I think they were protesting a perceived lack of prosecutorial discretion.

Now two cases is a real small sample, but I don’t often talk to jurors who are willing to tell me what happened in a jury deliberation.

I don’t think jury nullification becomes problemmatic for the court system until somebody suggests that it be used in a case where a jury will not come up the idea to nullify naturally and on their own (as in the two trials described above).

If you look at it that way, courts various efforts to avoid the jurors hearing about nullification makes some sense. You get kind of a de facto standard that says: if the injustice is great and apparent enuf then the jury will nullify even in the absence of a suggestion to nullify, but if the injustice is so subtle that it would not normally occur to the jury then they just need to “not go there” — they need to not be encouraged because then they will tend to overapply the doctrine.

When the frog finally notices the boiling water, is it too late?
Who is going to turn off the flame?
Police Chiefs?
Sheriffs?
City councils or county commissions?
Local judges?
State supreme courts or legislatures?
Governors?
Congress, POTUS or SCOTUS? The UN or ICC?

No.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.” —The Declaration of Independence

As a trial lawyer, I am deeply opposed to jury nullification in all but the most extreme cases. I also notice that advocates for it sometimes credit nullification when, in fact, the jurors have merely exercised their judgment even though it created an unexpected outcome given the language of the court’s charge.

But if we’re not allowed to talk about nullification, how do we know when it happened, whether it was just, or if it even exists. I haven’t read the Heicklen brochures, but even if they urged jurors to disregard the law and their own consciences and refuse to convict just for the purpose of bringing down a corrupt criminal justice system, how does that violate the 1st Amendment? Just because a position is extreme, does that mean it can’t be discussed with potential jurors?