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DEMOCRACY DEFINED I.
IS YOUR COUNTRY A DEMOCRACY OR IS YOUR GOVERNMENT A DESPOTISM ? II. THE RIGHT OF
JURIES COMMEMORATIVE PLAQUE; III. ILLEGAL "SELECTION" OF JURORS. IV. WHY THE LEGAL PROFESSION CANNOT DEFEND YOU. V. WHAT IS THE DEMOCRACY DEFINED CAMPAIGN ? VI. GET ACTIVE - JOIN
THE DEMOCRACY DEFINED CAMPAIGN. Campaign philosophy supported by academics, doctors and judges (U.S. & U.K.). Join in the Campaign by downloading and distributing the free posters and educational pamphlets. Contact us by e-mail today for your free Membership and privileges. THE PENN AND MEAD
EXPERIENCE... & The DEMOCRACY DEFINED CAMPAIGN strives for the re-implementation of the ordinary Citizens’ legal Right and Duty as a Juror to judge on the justice of law and every act of enforcement; and to annul the enforcement of bad laws and all injustices against citizens by finding the Not Guilty Verdict. THE RIGHT OF JURORS TO JUDGE
Penn was later Founder of Pennsylvania. Jurors do not decide the Verdict simply on whether evidence indicates a person "broke the law." Quakers Penn and Mead broke the law in letter and spirit in front of very numerous witnesses. The Penn and Mead infraction was knowing and intentional. The facts of the case were known to all: judge, jury and the public. There was no desire in the defendants to deny their brave stand. Indeed, their outspoken behaviour at trial indicated the converse. The evidence against them was incontrovertible. Latterday lawyers’ erroneous accounts of this case (which are intended to undermine the right to, to efface the value of, and to deny the necessity for, Jury Nullification) evade, or are in ignorance of the religio-political circumstances surrounding it. The King was not only Head of State but Supreme Head of the Established Protestant Church of England. Following Europe and England’s centuries of ‘religious’ wars and strife, the Church was in favour of and intended the most extreme castigation (decapitation or auto-da-fé, i.e burning alive at the stake) of adherents such as Quakers to "heretical religions." In religious matters, the Church could not be disputed. For Chief Justice Vaughan to have made an outright declaration or even an allusion to or recognition of the ‘possibility’ that the Jury in the Penn and Mead case could have annulled the prosecution on the grounds that the law was "unjust" would have earned him the executioner’s blade. It also would have set back the cause of religious freedom, which most educated people had at last come to adopt. Yet, in view of firstly, the absolute irrefutability of the evidence; secondly, the defendants’ defiant declamatory demands from the dock for independence of conscience; and thirdly, the intense hostility of the Church to even the slightest dissent, to allow the acquittal to stand was blatantly to confront the injustice and tyranny of the law. The Chief Justice’s upholding of the acquittal was acknowledged throughout the land and the Colonies as a sensational and supremely courageous act, especially given his proximity to the sanguivolent chief representatives of the Church. By his act, Chief Justice Vaughan upheld the jury’s Duty to acquit regardless of the law or the instructions of the judge, if the finding of a verdict of ‘guilty’ would be unjust to the accused. Exemplified by the above well-known instance, when the trial is by jury the Jury’s Right to acquit when it perceives that conviction or punishment would be an injustice, supersedes in authority the government and court. This event, and the Principle of Jury Nullification in general, confirm in the minds of the discerning that the Constitutional Common Law Trial by Jury, prescribed and defined by Constitutional law Magna Carta in 1215 (ratified repeatedly), is the finest and most democratic Justice System ever devised. For such ideal and moral principles, likewise, the U.S. Constitution enshrines the Trial by Jury as the sole Justice System for all (non-impeachable) crimes. The Enemy Within. A nation state governs by its Justice System. The power to punish carries with it ALL power. If at any time, albeit for an instant, the Supreme Power is removed from or ceded by the people, and the power is acquired by, or delegated to, a group consisting of LESS than all the People, then the democratic state has ceased to exist: an undemocratic government, that is, a despotism, has assumed its place. The Trial by Jury-based democratic society of the Hellenic ideal was implemented all over the world by the peoples of republics and constitutionally-controlled monarchies -- but democracy has repeatedly suffered destruction by the countervailing incursions of despots who brought about the annihilation of genuine Constitutional Trial by Jury. Stealthily, again today the enemy of the people has taken hold of the Supreme Power and obliterated Western civilisation from within, without a whimper from the majority of the people who have literally everything to lose in terms of life, liberty and property from totalitarian governments’ denial of Trial by Jury. It must be remembered that Trial by Jury is democracy’s Mechanism of Authority by which all the rights of all the People are protected by the People themselves, and on which all rights depend. When common law Trial by Jury was constitutionally installed as the sole Justice System for all crimes (other than impeachable), the authors and signatories of Magna Carta and the U.S. Constitution were establishing states of democracy; shining examples to the World. May the Campaign for RESTORATION and UNIVERSAL ADOPTION prevail. The history of mankind can suitably be described as the account of an unending struggle between democratic civilisation and the barbarity of despotism. Whenever and wherever the Supreme Power has been in the hands of the People, those undemocratic individuals who would seek to take this power for themselves and their partisans, first wrest it from the Citizen-Jurors and suppress the Trial by Jury. This they do through their beholden employees: the judiciary. The judges overawe and misinstruct naïve citizen-jurors: they deny the people their right to judge, and forbid them their duty to nullify bad laws. The Penn and Mead case exemplifies how, for all time, Democracy relies utterly on ordinary citizens having ultimate control of their Justice System. Furthermore, the case sets an example for today, not only to Jurors but also to citizens in judicial and magisterial positions in tribunals everywhere: In finding a Verdict, everyone is duty-bound to judge both the justice of the law, and on whether the behaviour of the accused was of mens rea, i.e. guilt or criminal intention, without which no crime can have been committed. (See section on mens rea; "Guilty ?" or "Not Guilty ?" which follows.) In the Penn and Mead trial, jurors found not the defendants, but the law wanting. Enforcement of injustice by state personnel is an illegal punishable act: cf. Crime Against Humanity; ratified Principles; 12-10-1946; International law. For Justice to prevail throughout the world, Trial by Jury is universally requisite. It is for the ordinary people at large represented by indiscriminately chosen adult citizens as jurors, to judge the justice of every contested act of law enforcement in finding the Verdict. At this point, one of the many aspects of the superiority of the Constitutional Common Law Trial by Jury Justice System is established over the primitive tyrannical system of enforcement-by-government-judges; which does away with citizens’ judgement and the Trial by Jury... As the paramount democratic Safeguard of the ordinary people against those in government who would do injustice, the jury is the only extra-governmental body [i.e. outside government and state employees] constitutionally emplaced to judge the law and every act of enforcement. Bearing in mind that no government ever conceded that the laws it enforces could be "unjust," this makes the jury’s judgement on the justice or otherwise of the law, the only true democratic testing of the law. "The Jury has the Right to determine both the law and facts."U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Samuel Chase; Signatory to the Declaration of Independence. Today, judges feloniously continue still to misinstruct juries to find a ‘guilty verdict’ without the jurors making a judgement as to whether doing so would be unfair to the accused. Be it well understood: Whether instructed to do so by the judge or not, whenever a juror convicts a person who, according to the juror’s conscience has not committed any wrongdoing with malice aforethought, that juror thereby commits a crime. The juror abets the Crime of Malicious Prosecution by the state: a criminal injustice occurs (cf. Crime Against Humanity). Jurors are ignorant, servile and morally wrong if they convict against their conscience—but, above all, in so doing they commit a crime; they strike a blow against democracy and the people; and they defile the Constitutional Trial by Jury Justice System. To convict someone Not Guilty of any wrongdoing is one of the most serious crimes it is possible to commit. This is the behaviour which drives politicians and judges to become confidently despotic beyond restraint. ENFORCEMENT OF INJUSTICE At all times, every adult person has the moral responsibility to suppress injustice. Every act of injustice is a common law crime, whether committed by private citizens or by the state. Jurors and government employees alike are accountable. See ratified Principles, U.N. Resolution, 12-10-1946: PRINCIPLE I: "Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible and liable to punishment." PRINCIPLE II: "The fact that internal law does not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under international law does not release the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law." PRINCIPLE III: "The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law acted as Head of State or responsible government official does not relieve him from responsibility under international law." PRINCIPLE IV: "The fact that a person acted pursuant to the order of his government or a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him." Whether by participation in the enforcement of arbitrary legislation, or from the following of direct orders, being party to the execution of injustice is a criminal offence (cf. Crime Against Humanity). In the Trial by Jury context, the moral choice quoted above is ALWAYS "possible;" it is definitively obligatory: the "choice" is mandatory. De jure, under pain of penalisation, all those involved at every stage of the creation, maintenance and enforcement of law, including jurors, must make the moral choice and judge the law, and accordingly take the appropriate action or make the apposite decision. TRIAL BY JURY IS INIMITABLE. Citizen-Juries educated and instructed to judge on the justice of law and its enforcement, can be relied upon to protect people from the state, when the state breaches correct behaviour in attempting to enforce injustices. It is for this reason that those who stand to gain money and/or power from tyranny by the imposition of unjust ‘laws’, regard the genuine Trial by Jury as an obstacle to be undermined and destroyed. Untrustworthy at best, of outright criminal intent at worst, are those who, instead of restoring Common Law Trial by Jury to its true form, would discard it altogether... Viz. for example, U.S. politicians ruining the People’s exemplary U.S. Constitutional rights to Habeas Corpus protection and Trial by Jury for all criminal and fiscal lawsuits, under the terms inflicted by the unpatriotic Patriot Act and other illegal legislative and regulatory interventions. Viz. for example, British politicians’ illegal and
unconstitutional intervention to deny the right to a Trial by Jury for de facto innocent
persons accused under numerous categories of venal* governments’ fabricated
‘offences’; see THE REPORT ISBN 9781902848167. Viz. for example, the antidemocratic commissars and politicians of the European Union malevolently installing the d’Estaing "European Constitution," overriding the wishes of the People as expressed in both referenda and polls. This specious charter imposes the prejudiced, corrupt system of trial-by-judges and denies Trial by Jury altogether. Legislators and judges are exposed to all the temptations of money, fame and power, to induce them firstly, to overlook and deliberately disregard justice in the framing, passing, interpreting and enforcing of legislation; and secondly, to become actively biased between contesting litigants, causing politicians and judges to sell the rights and interests, and violate the liberties of the People. Jurors are exposed to none of these temptations. Jurors are not liable to bribery, for they are unknown to the contesting parties until they come into the jury-box. Further, the laws of human nature do not permit the supposition that twelve adult men and women taken by lot (indiscriminately) from the mass of the people, will all prove dishonest. (Common law requires unanimity to pronounce a guilty verdict.) Jurors can hardly gain fame, power or money by giving erroneous decisions. Their office as juror is temporary. They know that when they have executed it, they must return to everyday life and they rely on all their rights being upheld by the judgements of jurors who will be their successors, and to whom they are an example. This Trial by Jury Justice System is unique and inimitable: that is, it cannot be equalled by other legal arrangements. It places a curb on legislation the enforcement of which the Citizen-Juror adjudges would be unfair and tyrannical; and a Jury ensures to us—what no other court does—that first and indispensable requisite in a judicial tribunal: integrity. The powers of juries not only place a curb on the powers of legislators and judges, but also imply an imputation on their integrity, impartiality and trustworthiness. These are the reasons why legislators and judges have harboured the most intense hatred for juries, and, so fast as they could do it without alerting the People to the loss of their liberties, have now destroyed juries’ power to judge on justice issues, and with it the Trial by Jury. The self-proclaimed Western bastions of ‘democracy’ are illusory. That which militaristic tyranny and the Twentieth Century’s Great Wars of Aggression failed to ruin, is destroyed inimically from within by parasitic individuals of insidious government. Whenever and wherever Trial by Jury is not in place, or it is allowed by the insouciance of the population to be interfered with by government and its representatives, there tyranny and crime inevitably prevail. The (Western) tradition of Judaeo-Christian morality and the universal natural common laws of equity and justice teach that Democracy, id est the control by ordinary people of every aspect of government, is to be favoured over and when necessary fought for in resistance to the foible of humans established in authority always to suppress the Freedom of others. Nowadays, Trial by Jury is precluded by judges’ illegal intervention to forbid jurors from judging on equity issues, on the justice of the law and its enforcement. The courts’ current unlawful modus operandi is to facilitate the tyranny manifest in the judiciary’s antidemocratic enforcement of inequitable statutes and regulations, which otherwise citizen-jurors en masse would emphatically annul. The motive behind, and explanation for, judges’ boundless treachery are the same today as they have always been, and they confirm that the indispensability of Trial by Jury is eternal: The judiciary is responsible, not to the People, but to the government; judges are dependent for careers, salaries and by impeachment, on the legislature: to remain judges, they must reliably enforce unjust legislation. Judges regard themselves as, and are, bound to enforce the laws, even when doing so is an act of extreme injustice. Once a law has been passed and interpreted for enforcement by the courts, then, unlike jurors, in the routine of court cases judges are not permitted to dispute or judge the justice of law and its enforcement. To allow these compromised humans to dictate the law, utterly surrenders all the liberties, rights, property and money of the People, to the arbitrary will of apostate politicians. Any person who would propose or support such a system of enslavement and subjection of the People, suffers from lack of education and knowledge of human behaviour and political history, or from acute antidemocratic mens rea (criminal intent). The infractions by modern judiciaries of the strictures of the U.S. Constitution and the U.K. Great Charter Constitution, and of universal natural law and justice, and the Common Law, are epitomised, and the injustice of today’s ‘justice system’ is demonstrated by judges’ prevaricative misstatement of law (which they are all too fond of reciting) that "parliament/ congress makes law, and judges enforce it." Au contraire... ... a just system is the only one that is legal: trial-by-the-government-judge has always been unacceptable to people of probity. Viz. the reasoned advocation of the Common Law Trial BY JURY Justice System, by the chief justices, judges, lawyers and heads of state quoted.Compounding their violation of common law and suffocation of Justice, nowadays, arrant ‘judges’ do not even permit defence lawyers to tell juries that it is a definitive and integral part of the Juror’s function to judge the justice of law enforcement. Thus is Trial by Jury by judges dismembered. The modern judges have judicably corrupted themselves beyond the pale, abetting and participating in abject tyranny with their perverted and inequitable misconstruing and enforcing of money-motivated criminogenic (crime-engendering) legislation. Under the Constitutional Trial by Jury Justice System, Common Law juries (not judges), try, reject or enforce the law. "The law itself is on trial quite as
much as the case which is to be decided." "GUILTY?" OR "NOT GUILTY?" It is an unalterable principle of the common law Trial by Jury inscribed into the Constitution (which forms the Supreme Law by which the executive, legislature, judiciary and all citizens are legally bound) that there can be no crime without there having been mens rea, that is, guilt or malicious criminal intent. Guilt is a personal attribute or quality of the actor. It might not be involved in the act itself but guilt depends on the intent or motive with which the act was committed. The jury must find a person acted from a premeditated malicious criminal motive, mens rea, in order to find him or her guilty. This is the issue the jury try: "guilt," or "not guilty". Malice aforethought is the criterion by which common law defines guilt. Justice can only demand the finding of a guilty verdict and punishment where there has been malicious criminal intent. There is no moral justice nor political necessity (i.e. deterrent value) for punishing where there was no mens rea. (In the case of one person injuring another innocently or accidentally, the civil law suit and the Trial by Jury award appropriate compensation for damages.) Guilt is an intrinsic attribute of actions and motives by which common law defines ‘crime’. Common law Trial by Jury makes malicious criminal intent or guilt a necessity preliminary to conviction. ‘Guilt’ cannot be imparted to an action simply by legislation. This mechanism of the common law Trial by Jury protects (is intended to protect) individuals from governments which have criminal ends and would seek to further them by making statutory ‘offences’ out of innocent acts which are not crimes. The mechanism can be effective only where the law is not broken by courts and government, and where the Constitution is faithfully upheld: that is, where the Jurors’ rights, duties, powers and functions are fulfilled, and these latter are not illegally denied or interfered with by judges, or by politicians’ legislative contraventions. In Constitutional Common Law Trial by Jury, it is the citizen’s Duty to nullify prosecutions of bad laws by dismissing charges against the accused by finding the Not Guilty verdict. Today, as throughout history, whenever this Jury Nullification Duty is suppressed by courts or despots, it is to serve a criminal, and frequently venal, motive of government and others implicated. Today, politicians and judiciary driven by the ulterior motive, infract Constitutions and common law, and on a routine basis fabricate ‘offences’ out of things which are not and never will be ‘crimes’. Wayward judges’ enforcement of the corrupt, inequitable and perjurious ‘legislation’ then fines, incarcerates and otherwise abuses innumerable harmless innocent citizens where their acts are without guilt and of no criminal intent. The corruption of the modern judiciary is self-evident in judges’ upholding the criminally arbitrary authority of government, by judges actively procuring conviction of individuals for acts innocent in themselves, and the commission of which therefore indicates no criminal intent—but which are ‘forbidden’ by illegal ‘statute’. In flagrant breach of morality and common law, judges routinely abet persecution of innocent people by permitting and participating in prosecutions of these false ‘laws’, simply because not to do so would lose them their job. In all these cases, the citizens involved are due Amnesty and Restitution (as for other Wrongful Penalisation). NOTA BENE:
Ergo: the virulent consequences of government denying or subverting Trial by Jury are predictable, premeditated and inevitable. Today and throughout history, the veracity and accuracy of the aforegoing two statements and derivative logical conclusion are confirmed by the experience. The outcome of governments’ violation and/or denial of Common Law Trial by Jury is that, today, as ever, local and national governments punitively enforce unjust laws and regulations on a routine basis. See TRIAL BY JURY ISBN 9781902848723 for examples of the extreme degree to which arrant modern ‘judges’ enforce injustices. JURY NULLIFICATION IS A PRIVATE DECISION. Jurors do not need to give a reason ever, to any person at any time, for refusing to render a verdict of guilty in the Trial by Jury. The defendant(s) found Not Guilty cannot be tried twice under the same charge. In upholding the acquittal of Quakers Penn and Mead, Chief Justice Vaughan pointed out that the court (trial judge) and the prosecution can never know what evidence or reason is in the juror’s mind by which he (or she) decides. See the wording (above) of the famous Plaque at The Old Bailey Court in London, which commemorates this landmark acquittal. Jury Nullification is not an ‘argument’ which one presents; nor can it be ‘disallowed’. A Right may be illegally denied and abused, but it is inherent to the life of every man and woman: it is never ‘lost’. One does not articulate Nullification in the court or the jury-room. It is a private decision: the legal and moral responsibility and duty of Citizen-Jurors always to prevent (i.e. nullify) the prosecution of a fellow citizen when conviction or punishment would be unfair. This is done by the Juror pronouncing the Not Guilty Verdict. If, in the privacy of the jury-room, another juror broaches the topic of nullifying the prosecution on the grounds of injustice, and if this is indeed the case as many modern ‘laws’ and prosecutions are oppressive [i.e. illegal], then one owes spoken support to that juror. Otherwise, however, discretion is called for, because judges are known to dismiss the jury, pronouncing a ‘mistrial’, after jurors have informed the judge that other jurors have raised the subject of Nullification. In the situation where no other juror seems to be aware of their duty to nullify enforcement of unjust laws, jurors can concentrate on the dubious nature of the prosecution witnesses, police, etc., in not finding a guilty verdict. Whenever, according to the conscience of the juror, the law is wrong, i.e. unfounded, venal, inequitable; or whenever the conviction or punishment of the accused would be unfair, it is the juror’s Duty to find the accused Not Guilty—for no one is bound to obey an unjust law—and today there are very numerous unjust statutes. In short, to straighten out our Western society, one must nullify the prosecutions of laws which one knows to be bad and unjust: and one has to get selected for the jury. Remember, ‘evidence’ that the accused ‘broke the law’ is irrelevant to the verdict when the law itself is unfair and thus illegal: in these circumstances, the only just verdict possible is that of Not Guilty. The jury’s power to reject and annul bad law continues to be recognised, as in the 1972 ruling of the U.S. District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals: "The jury has an unreviewable and irreversible power to acquit in disregard of the instruction on the law given by the trial judge. The pages of history shine upon instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge." The educated good democratic person adopts the overriding legal and moral duty to prevent injustice from being inflicted by the judge on the accused—one does not "ask" a lawyer, a QC or the judge for permission to perform this Nullification duty. Indeed, lawyers are forbidden from informing jurors of their duty to nullify bad laws; see Democracy Defined Campaign Philosophy page 4. Educated citizens are aware that nowadays, the courts (judges) go out of their way premeditatedly to misinstruct Jurors and deny them their proper functions, especially that of judging the justice or otherwise of the law. To counter the crimes of antidemocratic modern politicians and judiciary, The DEMOCRACY DEFINED CAMPAIGN strives for: THE RESTORATION OF TRIAL BY JURY. ILLEGAL INTERFERENCE IN JURY SELECTION, © All rights reserved. |
