The Injustice of Rigged Juries: It's Routine

[John Kilduff]

John Silveira column


Judges routinely rig juries against defendants and prosecutors play along. How? The judge asks the prospective jurors the following question: “Will you bring a verdict of guilty, even if you disagree with the law, if the prosecutor proves his case beyond a reasonable doubt?" Then all prospective jurors who answer in the negative are automatically excluded from jury duty.

As the Silveira column points out, "Our jury system is supposed to be a buffer between us--the citizens--and the government. It is there to prevent the abuse of power that governments have exercised since the dawn of civilization. Juries do not exist as an arm of the court, rather they are there as an arm of the people so that our own government can never arbitrarily throw those it has accused of crimes into jails like some banana republic dictatorships do. Nor can it fine them, confiscate their property, or execute them without the people’s consent."

The article then goes on to cite a famous experiment by Stanley Milgram, of Yale university, wherein test "teaching" subjects were to shock learning subjects in order to facilitate their learning. The shocks were fake but the subjects didn't know that. The shocks were also on a scale ranging "up to 450 volts". Now anyone should have known, from the pain evinced by the "learning" subjects, that something was wrong when they contorted in agony at the higher voltages. The "teaching" subjects should have used their judgment to stop when they saw the increasing levels were causing great pain. But fully 60% did not stop. They went along with their instructions, following the authority which told them to.

That means only 40% followed their consciences.

A jury has 12 persons. So perhaps 40% of those 12 would normally follow their consciences, and refuse to convict a runaway slave, or to sentence a man to death for a petty crime such as stealing a package of bubble gum or for a parking violation.

But those 40% have been removed from the jury pool by the judge's pre-qualifying question. So what is left are people who would convict someone if it is the law even if it is against their conscience.

That is not the purpose of juries. Juries are not an extension of the government or the courts. Juries are what keeps us all from falling under government tyranny.

When judges and prosecutors remove those prospective jurors who might vote their conscience, they defeat one of the most important purposes of a trial by jury, and undermine the original intent of our trial-by-jury system.

Rigged juries: it's routine today.

Maybe this also helps explain why nearly two-thirds of all death sentences are later overturned, or why 7% of all persons who have been on death row have been later cleared by DNA evidence alone.
see another John Silveira column

In my opinion, our criminal justice system needs great overhaul in many ways. One of those ways should be that judges and prosecutors should not be allowed to remove prospective jurors who would vote their conscience - as the jury sytem was originally intended to operate. Moreover, judges should have to instruct jurors that they may vote their consciences and that the case is in their hands.

80% of prisoners today are there for self-consenting "crimes", or "crimes where they consented with another" - not for violent crimes or for transgressions against others. This is a tragedy, and it is a travesty that judges are permitted to instruct jurors that they must find a guilty verdict even if they disagree with the law, as long as the prosecutor proves his case. It is a travesty of justice that jurors who would vote their conscience are pre-emptively removed from the jury pool. Because what that leaves are only yes-men to authority in the jury pool, only those who will do what authority tells them to do even if they know it is wrong or bad.

And that's not justice.