For the last week of June and the first 2 1/2 weeks of July I served on a federal jury in a health fraud case. Something has really hit me after serving on this jury. We had to convict 6 defendants, even though many of us didn't wish to and really didn't think they were that much a part of the fraud. BUT, the way the law is WRITTEN we had to find them guilty. What if laws were passed narrowing down freedom of religion and what the First Amendment means. A jury would HAVE to find defendants guilty IF the law was worded quite narrowly, EVEN IF the jury thought it might be unconstitutional. The jury could not decide the constitutional validity of the law; they just would have to deliver the verdict(s) within the limits and confines of that law. The courts would need to define the constutionality of the law on appeal.
I bet you know where I am going with this. Lately, there have been many interpretations of laws that we Christians consider rather narrow. But, a jury would have no authority to change the law. And I would imagine a jury couldn't even interpret it in a much wider sense than it would be written in the jury instructions.
In our two-day deliberations, our jury spent at least 50-60% of our time trying to understand the applicable law and terms contained therein. When nurses' aides hardly know what is going on, are they "aiding and abetting" in a conspiracy? They were according to the terms, "aiding and abetting," and "conspiracy" and "fraud" according to the government and the judges instructions to the jury. So, the six defendants may be going to jail for as long as 20 years. And here is the rub. Some of the people in the office who perpetuated this may not get much jail time as they plead guilty and cooperated with the government. However, they do have to pay exorbitant fines (one person has to pay a million dollars back). It seems to me that something is terribly wrong here.
This is why I'm thinking about this situation lately. Regarding Christians in the future--how the law reads is how one will be tried by a jury that may not even agree with the law or think it is constitutional.
The $1,551,466 Christian
2 days ago
1 comments:
"We had to convict 6 defendants, even though many of us didn't wish to and really didn't think they were that much a part of the fraud. BUT, the way the law is WRITTEN we had to find them guilty."
Actually a long-standing but little-known tradition in Anglo-American jurisprudence says that juries are also there to determine if the law itself is just. If someone is guilty of something the jury thinks shouldn't be illegal, they can find him not guilty.
Many judges don't like that, and I've even heard of judges preventing lawyers from mentioning that in court, but it is a tradition almost as old as the jury of peers.
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