There is a highly disturbing criminal case out of Mecosta, Michigan where Keith Wood, 39, has been charged with a felony for obstruction of justice and misdemeanor of tampering with a jury. His felonious conduct? Passing out fliers about jury nullification rights on the sidewalk of the Mecosta County courthouse. The fliers from the Fully Informed Jury Association describe juror rights that some complain are omitted by judges and prosecutors in explaining jury service before trial.
For the purposes of full disclosure, I served as counsel to the Rocky Flats grand jury which was criminally investigated for going public with their allegations of prosecutorial misconduct and a cover-up of crimes committed at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in Colorado. Click here and here. It was the first grand jury to be represented by private counsel in history and led to years of litigation seeking the release of the report quashed by the Justice Department.
The association prints fliers on various juror rights and powers. The organization posts its purposes:
FIJA works to:
• Inform potential jurors of their traditional, legal authority to refuse to enforce unjust laws
• Inform potential jurors that they cannot be required to check their consciences at the courthouse door
• Inform potential jurors that they cannot be punished for their verdicts
• Inform everyone that juror veto—jury nullification—is a peaceful way to protect human rights against corrupt politicians and government tyranny
Many courts have rules against lawyers arguing for jury nullification. The case law in this area is sketchy. There is no question that jury nullification has long been recognized as a historical element of the jury system. Indeed, in 1895 in Sparf v. United States, Justice John Marshall Harlan, wrote a 5-4 opinion saying that a trial judge has no responsibility to inform the jury of the right to nullify laws. It was a controversial decision since courts have recognized the existence of this right while penalizing anyone who tells the jury about it. See e.g., U.S. v. Moylan, 417 F.2d 1002 (4th Cir.1969); United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113 (D.C. Cir. 1972).
Putting aside the accuracy of such fliers (which I have not reviewed), this would seem to be an exercise of free speech by a citizen opposing what he views as governmental injustice. Now, after posting an absurdly high bond of $150,000, he is facing a five-year felony with up to $10,000 in fines, and attempting to influence jurors is a one-year misdemeanor with fines up to $1,000.
What do you think?
I decided to act rather than just complain on blogs.
Started a petition:
https://www.change.org/p/michigan-supreme-court-robert-p-young-jr-make-judge-obey-the-first-amendment
I didn’t read it first, but bettykath has the best idea yet. Jury trial and the nullification flyers are introduced as evidence.
Brilliant!
I think….since he was not influencing the jury on any particular case, discussing the issues of the case but merely distributing GENERIC and commonly available information about juries in GENERAL, there is no basis for charging him.
As I understand it, he was passing out flyers to anyone who was in the area. Some of which might be potential jurors but not actually ON a jury. Even if they were on a jury, the flyers were not targeting a case or a person who was being tried.
It is free speech. It is government overreach to charge him.
$150,000 bond for this leaflet crime is the same $150,000 bond for the Chicago cop who killed McDonald 14 months; the system is rigged by those in the system, aka as the state
The Sups are busy considering ways to neuter the trial by jury too, by destroying peremptory challenges.
Any prosecutor who brings this to trial or any judge who allows it should be gotten rid of legally. Somebody in the court house has to have a brain somewhere to see the disaster this arrest is. The jury will nullify if it goes to trial and waste the courts time and our money.
I never get picked for jury duty. Pragmatic & analytical type. The Judge, prosecutor & defense team interviews me.
Results, steer clear of this guy, he’s got a brain between ears.
The Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) has been handing out literature for many years and I have been harassed almost every time I do it. We are generally not allowed to hand out fliers except from sidewalks many feet or yards from where Jurors might enter the courthouse. At one time in our history Judges were mandated to inform jurors that they had the right to not only judge the guilt or innocence of the accused but also the legality of the law itself. Fugitive slaves laws and the Salem witch hunts were stopped because of the Juries routinely started finding the accused innocent.
Judges have made a conspiratorial effort to shut this practice down. They are not as honorable as we have been taught to believe.
My book also proves that the Judges have been doing a similar thing by allowing the fraudulent enforcement of the Notice of Federal Tax Liens on most Citizens. None dare call it treason or insurrection when the Judges do it but they have. The Achilles Heel; The IRS Notice of Federal Tax Lien at Amazon.
Once again shows that there are two standards of justice in this country: one for the connected, and another much harsher “justice” system for the rest of us.
The left attacks the first and second amendments, the right attacks the fourth and fifth amendments; the judiciary is complicit in these assaults.
Let’s thank Mr.Wood and the FIJA for fighting for us.
Each of us needs to step up and do more for our rights; the fascists are winning right now.
This is a no-brainer. The prosecutor will be embarrassed when the judge kicks this out of court. It won’t make it to a jury. Clearly unconstitutional application of criminal statute.
I agree with bettykath. He should get a jury trial and the jury has to read the flyers. This is a free speech issue.
Just as banning books tends to increase the readership of those books, the silver lining in this blatant attempt to suppress free speech concerning this important safeguard against the tyranny of unjust law is that owing to the prosecution of this man, more people than would have known about it otherwise will become aware of their ability, as jurors, to nullify such law.
If I were an attorney, I’d relish the opportunity to represent this defendant pro bono, both in terms of educating more people concerning jury nullification and in terms of exposing the egregious authoritarianism of the prosecutor.
The First Amendment is the last bastion of fundamental law that has held out from the onslaught of government intrusion into our lives.
The 2nd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th have all fallen by the wayside, with judges interpreting them out of existence for any effective meaning or protective rights. They are now all provisional and discretionary.
The First Amendment just demands that we be left alone in our thoughts, speech, religion, communications and association with each other.
But now even that is too much freedom for the government to let us have, and they have begun whittling away at that as well.
A very rapid slippery slope toward de facto totalitarianism.
Sounds like a free speech case. Hope he doesn’t accept a plea but goes for a jury trial where the jury gets to read his flyer as part of the evidence. Jury nullification is the one way the people have to indicate that a law is being unjustly used in a prosecution.
I believe nothing short of a 2nd Revolution can free this country again.
Our Constitution and our natural born rights are under attack. I know of no other way of phrasing it. This is unquestionable. We become so divided by partisan politics that we fail to unite against the common threat that endangers us all.
Some relevant quotes on the subject.
“There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.” (Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers, #78
“The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors: they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.” Sam Adams
“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” George Washington
“The powers granted by the proposed Constitution are the gift of the people, and may be resumed by them when perverted to their oppression, and every power not granted thereby remains with the people.”- James Madison
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends , life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government…”-Thomas Jefferson- Declaration of Independence
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them (rights) under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government”- Thomas Jefferson
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it” Abraham Lincoln
As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
— Tench Coxe (1755–1824), writing as “A Pennsylvanian,” in “Remarks On The First Part Of The Amendments To The Federal Constitution,” in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789, p. 2 col. 1
A friend of mine, and member of the Libertarian Party, Julian Heicklan has a long been at this effort of civil rights activism.
He too was prosecuted for doing it in NY, but after the embarrassment the AUSA was put through, they dropped the charges.
http://fija.org/2010/12/10/fija-activism-in-orlando-fl/
Total nonsense; those in power want to put this individual in jail for exercising his rights, but don’t want to put prosecutors and police in jail for violating defendants rights.
If I were on the jury judging _this case_ I would easily opt for nullification regardless of any judge’s instruction.