Public Nuisance |
|
|
Random commentary and senseless acts of blogging.
The first Republican president once said, "While the people retain their virtue and their vigilance, no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can seriously injure the government in the short space of four years." If Mr. Lincoln could see what's happened in these last three-and-a-half years, he might hedge a little on that statement. Blog critics Gryffindor House Slytherin House Ravenclaw House House Elves Beth Jacob Prisoners of Azkaban Muggles
Party Animals:
Jewish Bloggers Join >>  
|
Tuesday, February 04, 2003
You have to be pretty quick in the blogging business. This press conference, where jurors who convicted a marijuana grower but weren't told during the trial that he was growing only for a club that was licensed by the state's medical marijuana law, took place about 6 hours ago, and I heard about it on the local news 1 hour ago. Still, Talk Left already has the story, and Instapundit has already linked to Talk Left. Probably several other bloggers I haven't checked lately have it too. If the government continues to go for guilty verdicts essentially by tricking jurors into giving verdicts that they wouldn't approve if they were fully informed, it seems likely that the long term effect, hopefully before too many innocent people are rotting in prison, will be to shut down the drug war altogether. If juries start to realize that exculpatory information is being withheld from them, they may just start refusing to convict, and the Feds won't be able to get any pot grower, medical or otherwise. Not that I'd spend a lot of tears crying over that result. It's what the DEA and DOJ deserve for what is at best an attempted end run around the Sixth Amendment. |
