Joe Kelley
Administrator
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It may well be past time to change course or stay the course. The course may proceed according to plan or chance.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis30.html
Fin de Regime
by Eric Margolis
Europe's old political order is on its last legs, but there is nothing new to replace it.
How about the old tried and true?
TRIAL BY JURY
For more than six hundred years --- that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 --- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.
Unless such be the right and duty of jurors, it is plain that, instead of juries being a “palladium of liberty” --- a barrier against the tyranny and oppression of the government --- they are really mere tools in its hands, for carrying into execution any injustice and oppression it may desire to have executed.
THE FREE ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE
All free government is founded on the theory of voluntary association; and on the theory that all the parties to it voluntarily pay their taxes for its support, on the condition of receiving protection in return. But the idea that any poor man would voluntarily pay taxes to build up a government, which will neither protect his rights, (except at a cost which he cannot meet,) nor suffer himself to protect them by such means as may be in his power, is absurd.
Under the prevailing system, a large portion of the lawsuits determined in courts, are mere contests of purses rather than of rights. And a jury, sworn to decide causes "according to the evidence" produced, are quite likely, for aught they themselves can know, to be deciding merely the comparative length of the parties' purses, rather than the intrinsic strength of their respective rights. Jurors ought to refuse to decide a cause at all, except upon the assurance that all the evidence, necessary [*176] to a full knowledge of the cause, is produced. This assurance they can seldom have, unless the government itself produces all the witnesses the parties desire.
In criminal cases, the atrocity of accusing a man of crime, and then condemning him unless he prove his innocence at his own charges, is so evident that a jury could rarely, if ever, be justified in convicting a man under such circumstances.
But the free administration of justice is not only indispensable to the maintenance of right between man and man; it would also promote simplicity and stability in the laws. The mania for legislation would be, in an important degree, restrained, if the government were compelled to pay the expenses of all the suits that grew out of it.
There is much to read and little time, it seems, to digest, as events proceed in our dynamic world on this day and at this time.
It may well prove out that a New Age is upon us where the force of Public Opinion returns to that historical place whereupon we the people demand justice again as a right; perhaps given by God but none-the-less a right.
The decider has always been the one staring back at each of us as we look in the mirror.
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