Jury nullification. It has a long and mostly proud history, in the sense that in several historic cases juries have come down on the side of the good guys. But they don't have to.
I don't understand why they were charged with something where the prosecutors had to prove they conspired. Isn't there some charge more serious than say, trespassing, that doesn't require proving a conspiracy?
Reading further down, they didn't even get a conviction on theft of government property (but that wasn't an acquittal either).
And proving conspiracy really wouldn't be an obstacle on these facts.
I was just thinking that "conspiring" (in the vernacular) sounds like something much more sneaky than what they did.
"Conspiring" is what New Jersey politicians do to block lanes going onto bridges.
They were also apparently acquitted of possessing firearms on government property.
Do they possess firearms or do firearms possess them?
8: Yeah, and I wonder if that helped get the jury confused/gave them an excuse to indulge their nullification impulses: from OPB's coverage of the trial, it sounds like the defense tried to muddy the distinction between motive and intent, which I could see being more effective in a conspiracy context than if you were talking about the underlying offense itself. I.e., if you're asking whether they conspired to impede federal officers from carrying out their duties, the story the defense told--no, they were just getting together to exercise their right to protest, their motivation wasn't to impede federal officers--sounds sort of responsive, even if it shouldn't be (and wouldn't be if the question were whether their intentional actions in fact impeded federal officers). In any case I can't understand why you wouldn't at least charge the underlying offense as well as conspiracy. But I don't know anything about federal criminal law and I wouldn't be surprised if there was a good reason they brought the case the way they did.
10: they brought that charge under the provision that covers bringing a firearm into a federal facility with the intent that it be used in teh commission of a crime, not under the provision covering bringing a firearm into a federal facility full stop. So that charge couldn't stand if the other charges fell. I don't know if the lesser offense was presented to the jury as an alternative.
13.2: Helpful. Just also read that they were hung on the charge against one of them stealing government surveillance cameras - perhaps that was the lesser charge some of the jurors wanted.
IN SOVEREIGN CITIZENSTAN, FIREARMS POSSESS YOU!
14: I read that as there was at least one guy on the jury who wasn't going to vote to convict them no matter what.
This seems to me like an argument in favor of going full Waco on their asses next time something like this happens instead of taking the no-drama Obama approach. Fortunately (or not) Hillary Clinton is more prone to violence than Obama, so maybe these assholes will get the smackdown they deserve when they pull something like this again.
Fortunately (or not) Hillary Clinton is more prone to violence than Obama
Really? Based on what? I mean, Obama hasn't exactly been shy on the bombs/drone strikes/raids issue.
Sure, but only as president. If you believe what you read, the Clintons have been having people killed for years, in and out of office.
18: Clinton is on board with everything Obama has done but in addition has lobbied as Secretary of State for more aggressive intervention in the Arab Spring, for example. Obama may hold the record for most countries bombed by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate but he's far from the most bloodthirsty Democrat out there.
Although maybe you've got a point. "Barack Obama human sacrifice" produces twice as many google hits as "Hillary Clinton human sacrifice".
If Montezuma had just been able to figure out Cortez human sacrifice would prob have a better reputation.
IIRC, Montezuma had trouble because he wanted to do the full human sacrifice on some captured Spaniards instead of just killing them. I guess if you go through all the trouble to build a giant human-sacrifice pyramid, you look for occasions to use it.
And there's really no point in killing a Spaniard if you're just going to waste the meat.
Giant human-sacrifice pyramids were that era's nuclear weapons.
Obama may hold the record for most countries bombed by a Nobel Peace Prize laureate
I seriously doubt that. Yasser Arafat won the Nobel Peace Prize, remember.
That's nothing. Some hippie who never wrote anything but lyrics got the literature prize.
27: Rumor is next year they will be considering blog-commenters.
Some hippie who never wrote anything but lyrics
He also wrote memoirs.
29: And don't forget Tarantula! But maybe it would be better if we did.
No jury outcome should be a surprise. You're trying to get a unanimous decision from 8-12 people drawn from a population where the bookends are Obama birthers on one end and left coast anti vaxxers on the other. Good fucking luck with that.
31: Couldn't they have eliminated people with hard-core anti-federal government views during voir dire?
31: An acquittal is a unanimous decision, isn't it?
33: Yes. It's why you can re try off of a hung jury but an acquittal means no more tries barring you find something like bribes or threats on the part of the defendant were involved.
My point is that I don't think anybody would have been very surprised if they said the jury was hung.
26: How many countries did Arafat bomb? Two?
32: What if they're a nullification nut who's willing to lie to get past voir dire?
And that's not even getting into how people are fucking morons who largely can't handle concepts like reasonable doubt.
37.1: That's what I was wondering about. Is there any possibility of penalty for lying during voir dire?
35 was at least partially intended to set up a Blazing Saddles joke. I keep forgetting that everybody isn't me.
39 sounds like a very dangerous door to be opening.
How many countries did Arafat bomb? Two?
Even limiting it to successful bombs alone, that's low - Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, West Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland and Sudan. Unsuccessful bombings include Algeria, Brazil, Argentina, Cambodia, Spain, Australia, Colombia, Canada, France, and Zaire.
Kissinger won the prize and IIRC (with Nixon) was responsible for dropping more bombs total than anyone in history just in the Laos/Vietnam/Cambodia bombing, though that's only 3, arguably 4 countries.
39: Unlikely on criminal penalties as far as I know. There's a possibility it opens the door to retrial but man that's a hell of a mountain to climb. To get around double jeopardy you have to show the defendant was never actually in jeopardy. So if you can prove something like the defendant had covertly bribed or threatened a bunch of jurors you can retry him. In theory you could also get there with a juror who intentionally lied to get on the jury and never had any intention of giving any decision but an acquittal but offhand I don't know that it's ever been pulled off.
One of the jurors has spoken to journalists.
42: I was not aware of that. I knew they ran around taking hostages and hijacking things, but I'd thought that they restricted their bombings to Israel and Lebanon. And Jordan, now that you mention it. You learn something new every day.
46: God, that's what I'm talking about. They didn't prove conspiracy! It was just 41 consecutive days of a group of like minded people doing the same illegal thing in concert. I guess it was just 41 days of spontaneous happenings that started anew each morning like some kind of groundhog day for freedom.
And they didn't intend to prevent the workers from coming back to the office, that was just the effect! Why, the workers didn't even try going back into their offices while there were armed anti-government occupiers there, so how can we really know if they would have been prevented?
From the other thread:
A bunch of sovereign citizen types suffering no consequences for taking up arms against the federal government is an awesome thing to happen a week and a half before an election in which the likely loser has urged his supporters to take up arms if he loses.
Hard to say. On the one hand, this emboldens them. On the other hand, convictions would have made martyrs of them, so this avoids that. On the third hand, this gets them out of the news. Any verdict delivered even closer to the election would have been even worse for sane people than this was.
I'm surprised to find myself untroubled by this. I mean, I'm troubled that these jamokes are in the world, but I think I am ok with almost any given acquittal. Patterns of acquittal in similar cases would bother me, a lot.
Apo mentioned at the other place that the FBI had a number of informants at Malheur, and it sounds like the defense was able to make good use of that fact.
Patterns of acquittal in similar cases would bother me, a lot.
Well, they already got away with criminal activity at the original Bundy standoff, including no-shit training rifles on Federal LEOs. That quiescence by the gov't led directly to Malheur, and now this will lead to further escalation by rightwing extremists.
I truly believe that 98% of the chatter around post-election violence is just (not unreasonable) worry and big talk, but if you were some militia yahoo, what has happened in the last 8 years that would give you any pause about pushing the envelope beyond threatening open carry to actual illegal activity? Sure the one guy died at Malheur, but it was something very close to suicide by cop.
Was there an acquittal in the 2014 stuff? My recollection was that BLM backed off, not that that's great, but it's not what I'm talking about. Their arson friends were convicted but idk if there was a jury involved.
The trial for the 2014 Nevada standoff hasn't started yet. (I guess they were waiting for the Oregon one to end.) Trying to insist that the Oregon judge release them from custody until the Nevada trial is how their lawyer ended up getting tased.
Given how insane and medieval the system is it's surprising how often juries do get things right, but they're particularly likely to get things wrong in a case like this one, where the law seems crystal-clear but there's a lot of ambient bullshit about what the law requires. It kind of smells of a loss of control by the federal District Court and a fuck up by the AUSAs, though I haven't been following the trial and don't know the judge, so that is PURE baseless speculation.
I don't want to run roughshod over people's legitimate reactions with talmudic parsing of indictments so I'm gonna go take it out on some baby lawyer co-workers.
It was eye-opening when I was on a jury to see how rigidly people interpreted "beyond a reasonable doubt". Like, the word "reasonable" was replaced by "all unreasonably insane but constructible scenarios". We pieced together a scenario where the defendant could have been innocent, but it was a bizarre, crazy, unlikely scenario, involving twirling a machete hard enough to cut down branches, but not in a threatening way.
The full scenario, IIRC, was something like, "The plaintiffs came out of their house throwing rocks. The defendant had a duty to retreat. He got into his car, but was too frightened to drive off. So he got out his machete, and twirled it around, non-threateningly, in self-defense, on their property. Then he relaxed enough that now he could drive off."
As someone who twirls machetes to relax, I support the compassionate and empathetic approach taken by that jury.
58-9 -- Do you remember if the judge instructed you on how to interpret the standard, and specifically if s/he used any real world examples?
Oh, I forgot the cops. As the defendant was innocently protecting himself with the twirling machete, the cops showed up, called by the rock-throwers, who misled the cops on the phone. The machete guy tried to drive off as the cops arrived.
AIPMAOPBT, when I was on a mock trial jury for law students, the defense guys were mad at me when I said basically I didn't care what the expert said about the gun being prone to misfiring or the defendant about his motivations, there was no way I was going to believe that a guy accidentally shoots his ex at her place of employment the day after they broke up.
61: Definitely not during the trial, possibly the lawyers did during voir dire. But voir dire had been on a Monday, and we were deliberating on a Thursday, so it wasn't very proximate in anyone's memory.
I'm trying to remember whether judges normally give examples on reasonable doubt here. They usually do on circumstantial evidence (canonical one is it's ok to infer it's raining outside if you see a bunch of people come in shaking off umbrellas) and it's useful.
If you see literally any disaster, it's reasonable to infer Anthony Weiner is the cause.
66: his middle name is danger. also wtfingf with this october surprise bullshit?
I dislike Anthony Weiner, but we share a common taste in psuedonyms.
67 legit he's a priapic trickster god and we're all just his sex toys. Ugh, secret scientists, hack me OUT of his simulation.
We're all puppets dancing for Weiner.
A month ago I gave up trying to make sense of the election, because nothing made sense. Then the debates happened, and the world made logical sense for 4 whole weeks. And now it's back to not making sense. I'm just going to assume that Trump will win because a sequence of incomprehensible events. Before I was thinking "Russian hackers," but Russian hackers are comprehensible.
If naval bombardments count as bombing, Teddy Roosevelt could be in the running for the Peace Prize thing.
66: SO there's a doctor I hear about from a co-worker whose name is Tony, and I thought that I accidentally called him the name of the former politician. Then I looked him up, because I wanted to get it right, and it turns out that they both have the same name.
This seems right to me: http://mightygodking.com/2016/10/28/the-republican-monkeys-paw/
I have decided to opt into rumore both that (1) Weiner intentionally directed investigators to these accounts to get back at Huma for leaving him (2) NY FBI office did set this up to embarrass DC office for Garner takeover. Insane and improbable but if we are gonna have a soap opera let's FUCKING HAVE ONE.
If I said "you have a beautiful body" would you hold it against me? Without caring about who I said it to?
77: I prefer the rumors that Huma and Hillary are having an affair with one another, because good for them if so.
80 when Trump started saying she was on drugs I was like, god I hope so.
Since they shared a computer maybe Anthony logged in to Huma's account and wrote a steamy letter to Hillary about how last night was great but they can never do it again.
84: Nobody will believe you unless you send out pictures to prove it.
Now that Abedin says her emails shouldn't be on Weiner's unit, there are three likely scenarios:
- She doesn't understand caching or similar computer behavior, so she used his computer sometimes and thought she deleted but didn't;
- Weiner knew her password and was reading her email without her knowing;
- Russia hacked Weiner's unit and planted (fake or real?) emails on it.
I'd like to say 1 is most likely but this year who can say it's more likely than 3?
Russia hacked Abedin's device by infecting Weiner's, and it turns out they don't understand caching so they left evidence behind.
I'm a little down on juries just now, having gotten a pretty good whack on Friday.
This seems pretty good and explains why the prosecution failed to prove its case: http://www.opb.org/news/series/burns-oregon-standoff-bundy-militia-news-updates/trial-not-guilty-verdict-reaction-bundy
I'm actually glad Fry isn't going to be serving any time in prison. He seemed like a genuinely troubled kid in need of help.
He seemed like a genuinely troubled kid
He's 27, and if he doesn't go into prison and subsequent parole the plan to get him help is what?
SWAT team of psychiatrists. Just when he least expects it.
Nowhere is the essential fraud of the Bundy protest more visible than in its attempts to adopt and co-opt native histories of dispossession. The Bundys have styled themselves as indigenous people being pushed off their land. A recent Bundy Ranch Facebook post, for example, used Standing Rock's now viral hashtag, #waterislife, and there have been occasional confused postings about reaching out to the Native American protesters.
That's still a teenager in American years, gswift. Especially for the male of the species.
But yeah, I share everyone'a general outrage and bewilderment over the verdict.