SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Juries are unrivaled
social instruments. Through them,
civilization applies the Golden Rule to its worst problems and thus overcomes
them. Too bad the positive influence of
these juries is hedged about with legal constraints, lawyers’ selectivity and
ill-judged micro-management. Jury trials
would work better if the following principles applied beforehand.
·
Jury selection
should be random and irreversible. There
would be no voir dire or challenge,
except to exclude the insane and felons serving out their terms.
·
All evidence
would be admissible to juries, including coerced testimony. Any suggestion of unnecessary coercion in
evidence gathering would draw automatic disciplinary review on the police in
question. Let juries decide what
information is prejudicial, whether lawyers have been misleading and which
police misdeeds require counter-punishment.
In many cases, an innocent verdict pronounced for a suspect mistreated
by the police would authorize a corresponding investigation of the police in
question.
·
Juries would be
responsible for sentencing. Penalties,
fines and additional surveillance would be proportional to the number of votes
against a Defendant.
o Innocent: Twelve jurors for
o Innocent by Majority: From eleven to seven for
o Retrial with a new Jury: Split Decision
o Guilty by Majority: From eleven to seven against
o Guilty: Twelve against
Just an example; another might be:
o Innocent: Twelve or eleven for (to neutralize the random sadist)
o Innocent by majority: From ten to eight for
o New trial: From seven to five for
o Guilty by majority: From eleven to nine against
o Guilty: Twelve against
· The presumption of innocence should be jurors’ first inspiration and their natural choice; it would also by preached by judges as the most promising benchmark of justice.
·
Jury decisions
would be subject to review only if members of the same jury summoned a higher
court and another jury, based on appeals addressed to them by the condemned,
care of the first Court in question. A
simple majority of jurors could demand this retrial.
·
Judges and lawyers
would be subject to disciplinary review initiated by the juries they served
poorly. This last is very
important. Fewer than a dozen Federal
Judges have been dismissed for cause under historical discipline
standards.
The future World
Court – empowered with mass life and death decision-making over global issues –
should base its decisions and disciplinary reviews on the deliberation of
untampered juries. Every trial, criminal
and civil without exception should take place before a jury.
In The Shield of Achilles (Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, New York, 2002), Phillip Bobbit undertakes a systematic analysis of international law and especially its claim to legitimacy. Without going into detail, suffice to say that international law’s current legitimacy appears to be based on states agreeing to submit to its jurisdiction.
More and more often, these states are failing to satisfy their own claim to legitimacy (by failing to protect their constituent population (nation) from terrorism, for example, or by failing to improve its living conditions despite diminishing resources). Because of these failures, their latest incarnation of nation-states is being replaced by market states whose only claim to legitimacy is successful profiteering by financial (info) elites. This is Mr. Bobbit’s thesis in a nutshell.
Since the publication of his work in 2002, these market states have more than confirmed their illegitimacy by various swindles, political gerrymandering, environmental disasters and abuses of disaster capitalism, financial meltdowns and massive upward transfers of unearned wealth (growing exponentially over time with correspondingly frequent and ruinous effect on their host nations).
Unlike prior regimes, their ascent to power has not required an epochal war. A war that would have lasted several generations under the aegis of the prior regime, during which various contenders would have taken sides; won or lost intermittently; and dropped out, changed sides or been replaced by previously neutral newcomers. A war that would have ended by a near-universal peace treaty that would have defined the constitutional arrangement and new political regime to be shared by all the states involved, more or less in accordance with the wishes of the victors.
This model pretty much confirms Learners’ thesis: the Darwinian evolution of the most insidious and deadly weapon states.
A mercilessly brief summary of Mr. Bobbit’s brilliant analysis would include:
· The Treaty of Augsburg (1555) – the Princely State
· The Peace of Westphalia (1648) – the Kingly State
·
The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) – the
· The Congress of Vienna (1815) – the State-Nation
· The Treaty of Versailles (1919) – the Nation-State
· The Peace of Paris (1991) – the Market State
Almost bloodlessly and virtually overnight, this last one candidate confirmed its unfitness to rule. After an unbroken series of failed tests, it has become as unqualified to go on ruling as Soviet Communism was after perestroika. Failed states cannot legitimate themselves, much less international law.
So we find ourselves back on square one. There remain two fundamental questions to answer.
“…If the body of international legal rules cannot uniquely determine the legality of a particular act by the parties it is supposed to govern, how can it be law? And if international law is law, why doesn’t it seem to have any effect?” p. 642.
If the legitimacy of international law cannot be based on that of its adherent states, since they are undergoing their own form of decomposition and retain none themselves, what is left? The Alexandrian sword for this Gordian knot is trial by randomly selected juries in an adversarial court of law.
Within the confines of this court, the advocates of each side would be free to call upon any argument, philosophical position, historical treaty, etc., that Mr. Bobbit lists so diligently, in order to support their client’s case. They would be free to make use of any fact, norm, precedent, agreement, document, contract or myth that would support their argument. There would be no limit to the intellectual point of view, permutations and quibbles they could call upon. All of them would be equally valid and admissible, as long as they were relevant to the case at hand. No one philosophical school or administrative criterion could claim dominance over the others; all of them would be equally acceptable within this adversarial setting. As during other juried procedures, over-long and elaborate presentations would work against those who presented them, compared to those more summary and precise, granted a more sympathetic hearing.
However, none of them would uphold or challenge the legitimacy of that ruling. Only the judgment of a duly appointed jury could do so, and then the judgment of history. Should these juries be selected randomly in an honest manner, their decisions and those of history would be virtually identical, matching the objectivity of their judgment.
In essence, every argument for or against international law between states is equally applicable to civil or criminal law between individuals within states. After all, states are colonial aggregates of individuals with their own history, needs and aspirations, as well as collective equivalents, just like individuals are colonial aggregates of cells with their own … etc. And according to our precedents within the state, arguments against international law are void.
Contradictions are even more glaring in the case of international law. This is because, unlike in-state law, there is no higher power to call upon for final resolution. Otherwise, exactly the same parameters apply and the best solution in the individual case would also be the best solution for the collective one.
Law becomes legitimate when it upholds justice more often than its opposite (much more often, preferably; ideally, always). It does not matter what system of justice is established; what checks and balances it may claim; how philosophically beautiful and elegant it is; how well-educated, well paid or elite in status its officers. Disputants, their advocates, their state patrons and allies, and officials of the court may be insane, venal, biased, criminal or fascistically militant (for whatever reason) and may distort the pursuit of justice to fulfill those unfair priorities.
Mr. Bobbit and the constitutional scholars he invokes have tied themselves in knots trying to create a top-down system of justice so philosophically perfect that it would be impervious to these liabilities. In short, a black box capable of issuing pure, indisputable justice, regardless of setting and antagonists. This project is doomed to fail: any weakness that it did not display immediately would be uncovered later on by people devoted to its practice, and exploited, in a process of Darwinian selection, until the entire system collapsed from its ill effects.
The solution does not lie in top-down perfection, but in bottom-up reliability. No better mechanism has been found to avert this abuse, than a duly constituted jury of randomly selected peers doing their best to fulfill their naïve sense of justice, preferably guided by a court deprived of decision-making powers and mandated to provide those jurors with the best advice they would ask for. Therein lies the key to justice, be it during a contractual dispute, the punishment of an individual (both of which used to result in vendetta and more crime in the absence of this arrangement), or the settlement of international quarrels (with its result in war), absent that form of settlement.
Presently, jury
empanelment is like a three-ring circus.
Like old-school lion tamers, law school graduates must subdue every
juror. Court officers ‘screen acceptable
juror candidates’ for days on end, even though the courts are less and less
forthcoming with swift justice. Anyone
coming from a forbidden background (like law enforcement and the military) gets
rejected from jury duty. Other causes
for dismissal include ethnicity, poverty, firmly held views on crime and
punishment, and a prior history of police or criminal victimization.
None of these causes
for dismissal would be relevant on PeaceWorld.
High courts override jury decisions in arbitrary and prejudicial
ways. Such elitist jury tampering would
be unheard-of.
Basically, nowadays,
every juror goes on trial before the suspect.
It doesn’t matter if the officers of the court fall over themselves to
deny this fact.
A simple test exists
for every courtroom procedure. Assuming
you were on trial, would you care
whether members of your jury were subject to voir dire or not? Think
hard, lest justice be disserved.
According to Alexis De Tocqueville, jury duty was a key lesson in civics for
every American citizen to learn. The
fate of total strangers was entrusted to their care. Jury duty inspired their utmost civic
devotion.
Currently, that
lesson consists in being summoned for indefinite periods from one’s home or
job, being grilled on delicate personal matters, rejected over arbitrary
legalisms and bullied by supposedly omniscient, deliberately misleading court
officials. Many people take great pains
to dodge this boring and demanding chore; they consider their shirking fully
justified, and those that don’t dare it, idiots.
Weapon managers applaud
these perversions of justice. Courts
stigmatize responsible citizens as powerless pawns of central authority. In complex, formal ceremonies, perfectly
acceptable jurors are stripped of privacy, then branded incompetent and
superfluous to the needs of the State.
What a perfect lesson in good citizenship!
This is one of the
many ways weapon mentality ensures that the maximum number of citizens become
civic autists. We should make amends.
There is no better
protection against political reaction – or its flip side, chaosism – than
randomly selected juries. In addition,
jury duty is the first and foremost lesson in the sacred school of
citizenship. As such, it must never be
tampered with, lest we corrupt the entire constitutional system. We are certainly doing so today.
In truth, the duty of
juror should be every good citizen’s sacred obligation. "Show up in good faith, serve and be
honored thereby." Period.
Anything less is a
blatant disgrace.
It is possible that
every local jury member could be prejudiced against a certain kind of defendant
or case. This was the original reason
for voir dire in cases decided by
juries in the United States: to neutralize race prejudice that was practically
universal. In those cases, protocols
have already been established, that permit a change of venue to avoid local
prejudice. These should be
reinforced. However, random jury
selection would never again be compromised for that reason.
No doubt, clever
lawyers will find a way to corrupt change-of-venue protocols, just like they’ve
managed to rot out the regulation of randomly chosen juries. In that case, new protocols will become
necessary. In the meantime, simplicity
and elegance above all, please!
The more momentous
the court decision, the greater the call for randomly selected juries and the
more exactingly their unhampered conclusions should be documented and
enforced. Jury trials should remain open
to the public yet never become public spectacles.
During civil
lawsuits, potential jurors are eliminated if they disclose some root
understanding – job-related, school-learned or self-taught – of the
complaint. Law school graduates
eliminate the best-informed jurors from juries.
Unqualified jurors must rule on complex issues, with no help from
informed insiders. They are at the mercy
of any distortion court officers may dream up.
Judges worsen this
confusion. They refuse to answer juror
requests for clarification of the law (which should be their primary
responsibility). They reject pertinent
evidence as inadmissible. They forbid
note taking and other acts of juror initiative.
Finally, they override more and more jury decisions whose outcomes
disturb their prickly sense of propriety.
In addition, when
civil litigants agree to settle during a trial, they often drop the original
complaint. Everyone agrees to seal the
details of the case in secrecy, that no one may review them—especially not the
public and the press. In these cases,
the courts have conspired with litigants to deny significant information to the
public. Thus, great social evils are
tabled for decades, saving some judicial time but jeopardizing the safety of
innocents. The public suffers from this
denial.
Courts should seek
the greatest public good. Any lesser
pursuit is license for escalating banditry.
Legal settlement
agreements should expose serious problems of corporate malfeasance to public
scrutiny. Otherwise, out-of-court
settlements should take place earlier, before any formal request for trial. Court intervention should open wide the doors
of public transparency. Actually, this
suggestion would speed up many civil disputes, since most of them would be
settled out of court, hermetically and in private, long before they became
matters of public transparency where secrecy was not allowed.
Ladies and gentlemen
of the court, please note. The Law should
not be intended to deter crime, prop up power structures, identify and punish
the guilty or any such paranoid nonsense.
Sociologists have
come to agree (what a miracle!) that the only thing that legal systems hold in
common, when compared to custom and religion, is the imposition of
penalties. That is not really the case
at all. The primary function of good law
is to free the weak from capricious penalties imposed by the strong. Custom and religion have never managed such a
deliverance, on the contrary.
The weak protect
themselves best by serving the Law as honest jurors and letting this sovereign
process protect them.
During every court
session, judges should avoid beating their jurors over the head with the
obligations of jury duty and the penalties for having failed to obey them; and
instead refresh their spirit with this idea: the protection of the Golden Rule:
“Do unto him what you wish would be done unto you. Judge him according to your desire to be
judged under the same circumstances.”
One of Christianity’s greatest contributions to law and civilization,
even though this common law was much older and more widespread than youngster
Christianity.
The best body of law
unlocks doors both hardware and behavioral—as in: “We don’t feel the need to
lock our doors at night or when we leave home.”
Insofar people do not assume such things spontaneously, the Law has failed. No police intervention, all by itself, no
matter how forceful, can stop this tailspin into chaos.
A totally jury-driven
system would mature over time, gathering strength and clear-sightedness as it
became commonplace.
A mature weapon state
is also a state of universal terror where medieval gates are kept locked and
bolted, where police and criminal elites are the only ones that may carry
weapons, amidst a citizenry of disarmed peasants as vulnerable as they are
untrustworthy.
The reverse would
embody a universal
militia virtuously dependable and well-armed, a police force that
rarely felt the need for guns, and a criminal element that wouldn’t dare flash
them—not our constantly renewed yet thousand-year senescent weapon
tyranny.
Peace societies would
replace terror with physical abundance and inexpensive mediation (preferably
free and independently funded) of such superior quality, sophistication and
user-friendliness that public confidence and personal security would reign
supreme. Randomly selected juries would
uphold the Law and secure justice—like nothing and no one else could.
As demonstrated by
current weapon states, juries deliver more certain justice than law school
Mandarins. It doesn’t matter how well
trained, overpaid, technically competent and elite in status these Mandarins
might be. Sovereign juries would work
better.
Ladies and gentlemen
of the court, please get used to these ideas.
LEARNERS: On the Move from WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld