If we’re invading other countries and liberating their people from fascist governments in order to help them secure their basic rights as human beings, we would do well stop and think, now and then, about the state of liberty in our own country:
Since the Constitution needed to be amended in 1919 to authorize federal criminal prosecutions for manufacturing and smuggling alcohol, a juror wanted to know from the judge where “is the constitutional grant of authority to ban mere possession of cocaine today?”
[District Court Judge William G.] Young tried to assure the jury that the federal drug laws are constitutional because the Supreme Court has interpreted the commerce clause quite expansively.
It’s a preposterous idea that the government has any authority to outlaw what fully informed citizens decide to put in their bodies. If you’re called to serve, do what’s right.
I mean come on, the f**king commerce clause? Really?
Give me a break.
UPDATE: Some relevant earlier thoughts from Glenn Reynolds.
UPDATE: More on this at Volokh.
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Dave, the idea of government by enumerated powers died with Wickard v. Filburn. For practical purposes the power of the Congress in areas of commerce is unlimited.
It’s a ridiculous notion. It’s not “commerce,” it’s a moral judgement on what we’re allowed to consume. By that theory, anything that involves an exchange of money (which is pretty much everything) could be made illegal, and the rest of the Bill of Rights is rendered fairly meaningless.
Just because they’ve ruled on it doesn’t mean they were right.
No, it doesn’t mean they were ‘right’ in a cosmic sense, but it means that they have defined ‘right’ in every meaningful way that matters to law.
Don’t like the law? Work to get it changed. That’s what ended Prohibition: people decided the cost of trying to enforce a stupid law outweighed its perceived benefit. Voila: a new amendment repealing the stupid one.
Can’t get the law changed but still cannot go along with the will of the people? Then act according to your conscience and be prepared to pay the consequences. Stand up for your principles.
Jury nullification is what we saw in the OJ Simpson trail. Did you really love that?
Jury nullification is what we saw throughout the early part of the century when southern juries refused to convict KKK members for lynching, castrating, or just plain killing Blacks. Worked out real well there, too, didn’t it?
Jury nullification is what we see when an inner city jury refuses to convict a young Black man for theft because, well, you know that store can afford it. Why again was it that commerce left the inner city?
There might indeed be a few cases in which jury nullification is the right thing to do. Most of the time, it pushes the legal system one more rung down the ladder of corruption.
The jackass who got booted off the jury should have been jailed for contempt, in my book. If his jury instructions are anything like the ones I’ve seen, he swore an oath in court to reach a verdict according to the law. Clearly, he was not actually prepared to do that. He was not asked to write the law the way he thought it should read.
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Don’t like the law? Work to get it changed.
Nullification is working to get the law changed. That’s a big reason why Prohibition fell: juries simply refused to convict.
It’s not a perfect system. It’s just the best one we have. Better a few guilty go free than millions be wrongly imprisoned.
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