We have all heard of “judge-made law.”
But Mommy Professor is very silent on the subject of “jury-made law.”
And one lesson we must learn is that silence from Mommy Professor is as important as his outright blatherings.
Talking about liquor laws reminded me of jury-made law. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Charleston, SC opened its bars. When you went to Charleston, there were open bars and liquor by the drink.
Once in the 1940s, Governor Olin D. Johnston, “a personal and political dry,” called the Mayor of Charleston with the press watching and said, “I demand that you close those bars in Charleston.” The mayor replied, as Johnston knew he would, “Governor, YOU close them.”
Thus were two successful political careers advanced.
As I pointed out in the case of Mississippi’s prohibition laws, there was a huge difference between MAKING a law and ENFORCING a law.
Governor Johnston would have had to bring bar owners in Charleston before a Charleston jury.
Lots o’ luck there, Olin D.
The whole concept of jury-made law has been alien to Americans since the Greatest Generation took over.
Once again, I have to tell you that I am not exaggerating here: before the Greatest Generation, jurors were really not all that intimidated by a grown man sitting there in a black dress. The reverend stillness with which people called for jury duty today was alien to pre-WWII Americans.
In fact you already know about jury made law. You know that the death penalty for theft and other minor crimes was gotten rid of because juries, knowing the judge would follow the law blindly, simply refused to convict.
That, after all the arguments, was what happened to South Carolina’s ban on liquor by the drink: Juries simply refused to convict.
But the Greatest Generation was a wholly different matter. To them, the Judge was Authority. He wore a costume and his word was, to coin a phrase, law.
Some poor bastard who had had to shoot somebody in self-defense was convicted of manslaughter by a jury because the man in the costume had told them that, according to the law, he should have thought the whole thing out in the few seconds while he was being attacked and had a gun in his hand.
I actually met one judge in my youth who was absolutely dumbfounded by the way his jury actually sent a man, for not having behaved in the manner the law says a lawyer with hours to ponder things would have behaved, to prison for the rest of his life.
He told me he had always said that a jury would NEVER convict a decent person.
But it was his first Greatest Generation jury.
No one called for jury duty today has the slightest concept of what a jury is all about.
They are there to obey.
#1 by Dave on 03/16/2011 - 10:30 am
By refusing to review and sanction the decisions of Federal judges, Congress supports the simple rule that governs all government policy whether local or Federal: “We shall not be held accountable for anything under any circumstances, ever.”
It is impossible to charge the government with wrongdoing. The government is unassailably sovereign. It functions without restraint. This is old story in human affairs.
We live in a time where the government is the successor to any injury. Redress by the people themselves is banned. The character of the injury itself is irrelevant.
That is why your county courthouse is such a sickening place. Even to get in the door, you are offended by having to empty your pockets, take off your belt, and be scanned through a metal scanner. You are immediately treated as a slave and a prisoner.
The arrogance of the local officialdom, from the prosecutor’s office with its pretence of separation from the police; to the cops in the their absurd clown suits, to the judges’ chambers; to the insulting design of the courtroom of hard benches, theater inclines, daises, and elevated desks; to the hallways of locked doors; to the clerk’s office and the long line of peons lined up to pay their extortions before the cashiers cage; it is all off the charts – an offense to human decency.
NO ACTUALLY FREE PEOPLE WOULD TOLERATE THIS FOR ONE SECOND!
My hatred for the human garbage that is ensconced in this system is beyond description. I have a chip on my shoulders the size of the Brooklyn Bridge for I will not tolerate another insult coming from them.
That is what our “respectables” never understand – the sheer size and profound depth of the hatred they sow into the world.
That’s the hard part of living under the vile dictatorship we suffer – it is the sheer scale of the daily shame and cowardice of it.
I can judge the character of a man in an instant by his attitude toward a courthouse.
That is why a lot of people on our side do not know who their real friends are.
#2 by Simmons on 03/16/2011 - 11:42 am
The day is closing on the religion of PC, pleasant discussions of useless assumptions predicated upon vaporous abstractions are dying. So noted by RobRoy
My WAG about “justice” real justice, the worst fear of men in the future will be that of being labled an “anti-white.”
http://www.alternativeright.com/main/blogs/zeitgeist/the-house-we-live-in/
#3 by James C on 03/17/2011 - 11:41 am
I admit that I was at a loss to understand what happened to Americans before Bob explained how the weakest generation earned their nickname and traded our birthright in exchange for mommy professor’s approval.
The push for informed juries and the idea of jury nullification emerged emerged several years ago on the patriot/conspiracy scene. As usual they correctly identified the problem but failed utterly to understand the cause – that Americans had devolved from a fiercly independent nation into a country full of Authority-worshipping, respectable curs.
Eisenhower typified the weakest generation’s heroic surrender-monkeying when he told the country in response to Brown vs. Board of Education, something to the effect of “we may not like the Supreme Court’s decision, but it is THE LAW, and we are compelled to obey”. Andrew Jackson’s Americans were not Tom Brokaw’s broken-willed “dogfaces”.
Today the only juries that maintain their own “prerogative” are OJ juries, but the future does not equal the present. The surest cure for liberalism, is living through the results of liberalism.