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Are Extinction Rebellion more popular than I thought, or was it just that jury? “Jury acquits Extinction Rebellion protesters despite ‘no defence in law’”, reports the Guardian.
I remain a supporter of the principle of jury nullification, but, sheesh, guys, this isn’t 2018. Obviously I am in a bubble. I had thought that the blowback after XR stunts like disrupting public transport and doorstepping Sir David Attenborough – stunts that seemed calculated to target potential allies – had turned most people against them. Evidently not all.
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I’d rather have a few rogue juries than no juries at all which is what some people propose for more criminal cases.
Must agree with pete on that
Jury selection remains one of the most important steps in criminal defense and prosecution.
And it’s pretty much a crapshoot. Everybody lies, especially the most ideological.
The jury system is premised on a mostly-monolithic society. Once you get highly polarized “sides”, it becomes farce.
And it’s still the best system.
(Buy guns and ammo.)
Is anyone taking bets on the timing of the next Establshment attack on the jury system.
I wouldn’t have voted to acquit on this case, but I’m happy that the principle of jury nullification still stands.
If only one side argues then that side wins – no matter how bad its case is.
The prosecution never argued that the claims of impending doom that “Extinction Rebellion” makes are wrong – and neither does the government or any institution (public of private).
So it is only natural for a jury to decide “well if the very existence of life on Earth is at stake – some petty law breaking is justified”.
If your sole knowledge of the debate about C02 emissions was what the mainstream media and the government present – then it would be natural to conclude that Extinction Rebellion are correct.
This is a widescale problem in the West – the refusal of “conservatives” to argue back, the decision to just go along with the left in order to try and preserve private wealth and position.
It is not just the environment – it is everything.
President Trump may not have opposed the Collectivists very well – but he did oppose them. How many international “conservative” leaders do that?
Nor is this recent – for example Prime Minister Balfour (more than a century ago) thought ever more “Social Reform” (government spending and regulations) was the way to prevent socialism – he failed to see just how utterly the reverse of the truth that is.
Prime Minister Disraeli and Chancellor Bismark had followed the same wrong headed policy before him.
Concede all the matters under debate – and follow the policies suggested by the Collectivists, just with the hope that you and your friends can remain “in charge” (and thus preserve your own private wealth and position – and those of your pals).
In Germany the “conservative” government is even closing down all nuclear power stations. Why not vote for the Greens if this is how the “conservative” CDU behaves?
bobby b.
As you know most voters in Minnesota voted for Keith Ellison (a fanatical Collectivist) to be State Attorney General.
There is very little chance that such people would give you a fair trial if they were on a jury – even if you faced an utterly absurd charge, such as using a Time Machine to go back and burn Rome under the Emperor Nero.
Many decades of Collectivist indoctrination, by both the education system and the mainstream media (and even by the churches), have done their work.
Many (most?) of the people in your State want “Reactionaries” to be destroyed.
Remember Joseph Biden openly said (on national television at his “Townhall”) that he supported “Trans rights” for EIGHT YEAR OLD CHILDREN – (8 year old children), then supposedly 80 million people voted for this creature of evil.
“It was nothing like 80 million people really” – O.K. let say it was half that, that is 40 million.
40 million people – think about that.
You can not reason with them – for they reject reason.
And you can not appeal to their mercy – for they have no mercy, not for “reactionaries”.
How many people know that the predictions of James Hanson (NASA) and the other Warmists (for want of a better word) have been WRONG again and again since the 1980s?
How many people know that the temperature and other data put out by the American government and other official bodies are systematically rigged?
I would guess that less than 1% of the population know these things – and the population is where juries are picked from.
What the public does “know”, because the British government and all institutions, private and public, tell them this all day long, is that C02 emissions threaten to destroy all life on Earth. Turn us into Venus – “The Earth is on Fire!” as Time Magazine puts it.
If I believed that then I would find Extinction Rebellion “Not Guilty”.
Just as if I believed that millions of people would die without a lockdown and HCQ and Zinc (indeed no Early Treatment at all) has any effect – then I would support lockdowns.
And remember this is, de facto, what the establishment say – endlessly. The streets will be piled high with dead if there is no Covid lockdown and no Early Treatment has any real effect.
If people believe this – then their support for lockdowns is quite logical. Even though, in reality, lockdowns do not reduce the deaths over the full period of the pandemic – and there are Early Treatments for Covid 19 and have been from the start.
When someone like Senator Ron Johnson tells the truth (about Covid Early Treatment, or Antifa people in the Capitol Building on January 6th, or the environment – government agencies falsifying temperature data just as they now falsify voting figures in Presidential elections) establishment “conservatives” do not support him – on the contrary they rush to mock him and attack him.
The idea is simple “I am not like him, he is a monster – destroy HIM, leave ME and my associates alone”.
The left claim that establishment conservatives are both selfish and cowardly – easy to see how they got that impression. “Do not hurt ME – hurt HIM, I will even help hold him down for you” being the establishment motto.
I didn’t spot a reference in the story to the judge being told that the jury couldn’t agree a unanimous verdict, and sending them back to try for a majority verdict. So I assume it was unanimous.
Assuming a jury of randomly selected individuals, each of whose views on the suitability of jury nullification in this case is independent, and assuming the populaton as a whole is 50-50 on the question, then the probability of a unanimous verdict is about 1 in 4000. Or not very likely.
But this is Central London so perhaps the population is more pro Extinction Rebellion than in te population as a whole. Let’s guess 80-20. But even then the odds are something like 15-1 against. Even at 90-10 it’s 7-2 against.
We can therefore conclude that the jury was not randomly selected, or that the jurors’ opinions were not independent of each other, or both. Of course in a verdict based on evidence, it would not be surprising if jurors’ views were not independent – they would be aligned by the evidence and by jury room discussion of the evidence. But here it’s not a matter of evidence, it’s just morals or politics.
We can conclude, provisionally, therefore that there were a number of strong pro nullification jurors, and the rest just wanted to get home in time for tea.
From which we can conclude that jury trial is the worst possible system for determining guilt in a criminal trial. Except for all the others.
I’m guessing the activist vandal didn’t quote this:
True in logic, but many a celebrity activist has flown their private jet to and from their speaker slot at a climate alarmist meeting. You can have it both ways easily enough within the mutual admiration society that is political correctness.
If only the last part were true. Sadly, it is as big a lie as the rest.
So much for the activists. As regards the jury
I wonder how many of them it was who decided Sir David was an old fossil whose logic was unworthy of this woke time. Enough to acquit, evidently. Lee Moore (April 24, 2021 at 3:24 pm) suggests it was all of them – I defer to the lawyers in these comments whether his reasoning is valid. If it was all of them then I seriously doubt the honesty of jury selection – Hillary Clinton’s six consecutive coin toss wins were less fluky than that would be.
Frankly, I could care less if they were still stuck to the windows or doors.
These people do that shit because they know there will be no serious consequence.
I repeat – the Prosecution never argued the case, not the REAL case.
I am reminded of the case against the people who organised the escape of George Blake from prison – Mr Blake being a Marxist traitor.
The prosecution refused to argue “politics” – and the defence argued nothing other than that George Blake was a noble man fighting for peace, and the CND people who got him out of prison (and safely to the Soviet Union) were also struggling for peace against the wicked warmonger West.
If you do not argue the real case (the political case) of course the jury is going to find for the other side.
And what could the prosecution say that is not contradicted by all Western governments (and schools and universities, and Corporations) every day?
For example, say Extinction Rebellion broke into this house and hacked me to death right now – they could say at trial “Paul Marks associated with Tony Heller – he liked Tweets, he even talked to this evil Money Jew. These people are out to DESTROY ALL LIFE ON EARTH with their CO2 emissions – your lives and the lives of billions of other people are at stake”.
If the prosecution “refused to discuss politics” (i.e. make a real case) and just endlessly repeated “breaking into a house and hacking someone to death is against the law” then the jury would find that the Extinction Rebellion had done nothing wrong.
After all if I, and people like me, really are trying to wipe out billions of human beings – then we deserve to be hacked to death.
Allowing one side to totally control a debate (indeed every debate – on many different issues) and slavishly following their policies, in the hopes of “staying in power” by doing so, may not be a very good idea.
David Hume and F.A. Hayek – institutions of justice just grow (evolve) without people having to argue the case for private property and liberty every generation, indeed every day.
Interesting theory – but totally WRONG.
In reality if you stop arguing the case even for things like laws against theft (“ordinary people can not understand such things – and behaviour is predetermined anyway, free will is illusion”), then the law collapses.
In California and many other areas of the United States “minor” theft is no longer going to be prosecuted (at least there is a strong movement in this direction) – because the criminals “need” the stuff so much more than the wealthy.
That is the road to the “social bandits” (Social Justice – the Churches love it, as does the eduation system and the media) of Latin America – such as MS13 whose motto is “Rape, Kill, Control”.
The Biden/Harris Administration (really the Harris Administration) thinks they are socially friendly elements (in line with the cause of collectivism) and they are correct – they are.
Extinction Rebellion are also socially friendly elements – as they say themselves “Climate Justice is Social Justice” and they are quite correct, it is, Western governments (including that of the United Kingdom) say this every day – and they hold Social Justice to be a good thing (not the abomination that it actually is).
So the Prosecution has nothing to say – even if they do not privately agree with Extinction Rebellion.
Keith Ellison – Attorney General of Minnesota most likely does agree with the people who have set up the George Floyd AZ in Minneapolis.
White people are devils – they believe in private property and other capitalist wickedness, and just having black skin does not mean that you are not “really” white – “whiteness (capitalist evil) can be on the inside”.
Do not be shocked – the schools and universities have taught all this for years. Did you think that what was taught did not matter?
And if you teach that people like me are out to kill billions of human beings with our C02 emissions then of course we will, eventually, be hacked to death – and juries will find nothing wrong in this.
Why would they find anything wrong in it?
Remember that “Critical Race Theory”, including the idea that people with black skin can “really” be white (and, therefore, capitalist devils – the evil of “whiteness”) is being taught to the American armed forces – including people in charge of nuclear weapons.
President Trump tried to stop this – but he is gone now. Election Fraud has consequences.
Mr Joseph Biden wore a mask during his electronic conference with other “world leaders” on “Earth Day”.
Just as CO2 is plotting to destroy the world, so Covid 19 can transmit itself over the internet – that is why Mr Biden has to wear a mask (even though none of the other politicians was wearing one).
If you have doubts about any of this you are a heretic – and even Saint Augustine (the most gentle of men) agreed that force sometimes has to be used against heretics, for the good of the general community (who might, otherwise, be contaminated by their heretical ideas).
Extinction Rebellion agrees with Saint Augustine on this point – and soon juries will as well.
And the United States Armed Forces – with their declared aims of protecting LGBTQ…. rights (all over the planet), Social Justice, Critical Race Theory, and fighting “Climate Change” by-any-means-necessary.
Even those nuclear weapons?
I wonder what the British Armed Forces are being taught about Critical Race Theory and Climate Justice.
Frankfurt School of Marxism – now fully endorsed by the Church of England (Critical Race Theory and Black Liberation Theology).
“Just let things evolve” really means “let the other side control everything”.
Comments need to be at least somewhat on-topic regarding the post.
@Lee Moore
the probability of a unanimous verdict is about 1 in 4000. Or not very likely.
Taken in isolation perhaps, but there are thousands of trials where the verdict goes according to expectations. Things that are 1/4000 probability do in fact occur, approximately once in every four thousand trials (if you will excuse the pun.)
I think this is pretty much like cops killing black folks in America. It is exceedingly rare, but if you only hear about the one encounter where the black person is shot and not the one million where nobody gets shot, you get a very skewed view of things.
@Perry de Havilland (London)
Comments need to be at least somewhat on-topic regarding the post.
Is this a new Samizdata policy? 😀😀😀
I have to disagree with your math (or at least your math isn’t working for me.) You’re missing some important factors and assuming randomness where there is none.
Most verdicts are unanimous. There’s always pressure in a jury to conform, to go along with the majority, both because people like to have other people like them, and because people know their fellow jurors want to get home to their lives ASAP. Nobody wants to that THAT juror.
So, most verdicts do end up unanimous, one way or the other. (Heck, generally a criminal trial can only come to a guilty finding if the verdict is unanimous. Yet, we get a guilty verdict far more often than 1 in 4000 trials.)
What is to stop Shell suing the individuals concerned for damages? I’m not a lawyer but even when the courts don’t find someone guilty of criminal activity, there is the lower bar of proof required in civil courts. I’m thinking of the OJ Simpson murder trial. He got of that but was sued by relatives as I understand it.
bobby : Nobody wants to that THAT juror.
Except Henry Fonda 🙂
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my maths – I stipulated randomness and independence. You may reject the stipulations, but that doesn’t make the maths wrong. For the avoidance of doubt, I am using these terms in their formal probability theory sense. A juror’s verdict is independent of another juror’s verdict, if the probability of the former is not affected by the probability of the latter.
I quite agree that in a normal trial, where there is actual evidence to be considered, jurors are unlikely to be independent of each other (as I mentioned.) You would expect jurors NOT to be independent of each other, because you would expect them to be swayed in the same direction by the strength, or otherwise, of the evidence. There’s a biasing factor that applies to all jurors – the evidence – making it very likely that the verdicts will be correlated.
But this case is different. There’s no dispute about the evidence, the question is whether the perps should get off for moral or political reasons. All other things being equal, you would not expect 12 randomly selected individuals to agree on a moral or political question, unless the question is something like “are Nazis baddies ?”, “is rape a good thing ?” etc, ie where the general population is 95% plus on one side.
It is hard to believe that the population – even in Central London – is 95% plus on the question of whether it’s OK for climate activists to vandalise commercial premises. I mean not even St David Attenborough is onside for that.
Why, instead of committing acts of vandalism, don’t XR just lead the way by giving up anything that was produced using fossil fuels? Apparently it is really easy and straightforward to do so so what are they waiting for? Just demonstrate how to live without emitting CO2 to prove how easily it can be done. I mean, it would probably involve living outdoors, going naked and eating berries but we have a planet to save.
I find it difficult to understand how anyone who was older than fourteen in the 1980s can be unaware that the climate alarmists are consistently wrong. They have been preaching their message of doom for nearly forty years now and not been right once.
Stonyground : Why, instead of committing acts of vandalism, don’t XR just lead the way by giving up anything that was produced using fossil fuels?
Because reason, obviously, is not their strong suit.
They did not, for example, compute that breaking windows and graffiti-ing walls would lead Shell to :
(a) buy some new windows, which need to be manufactured using lot of fossil fuels and
(b) clean off the walls with all sorts of nasty chemicals
Had they merely stood there and chanted stuff, the planet would have suffered no harm. Nothing dangerous (to the planet) about spittle. But their destructive form of protest has brought the planet a few inches closer to its doom.
Not just wrong but comically, extraordinarily wrong. It’s amazing to me that the Climatists can not only push all the old predictions about global ice ages and no oil by 2000 and catastrophic worldwide starvation out of their minds, but simultaneously accuse those of us who treat their current predictions with skepticism as idiots and “science deniers”.
It’s either a miracle of artful doublethink or else the ballsiest chutzpah ever seen.
Have you ever seen the video of Ted Turner on Larry King (probably in the late 80s or early 90s) explaining that cannibal gangs would be roaming the streets of the US by 2000 because of the depletion of natural resources? Down the memory hole …
@bobby b
Most verdicts are unanimous. There’s always pressure in a jury to conform, to go along with the majority, both because people like to have other people like them, and because people know their fellow jurors want to get home to their lives ASAP. Nobody wants to that THAT juror.
I thought a particularly egregious example of this occurred recently in your neck of the woods. Lisa Christensen, one of the alternates on the Chauvin trial said “I felt like either way you are going to disappoint one group or the other. I did not want to go through rioting and destruction again and I was concerned about people coming to my house if they were not happy with the verdict.” A statement that seems to belie the consideration of evidence entirely. Unfortunately I think her concern with people coming to her house (presumably not to congratulate her on a job well done), is entirely justified and really quite terrifying.
It seems like throwing Chauvin on the pyre was a small price to pay for the inevitable conflagration should he not have been convicted. One might argue that it was the criminal justice system thrown on the pyre with him but I guess there is enough slack in there to allow a few injustices. After all the saying is “let ten guilty go free lest one innocent be punished” rather than “let ten thousand guilty go free lest one innocent be punished.”
Not that I am claiming Chauvin was innocent, just that it would have taken more than ten hours to consider all the evidence before declaring him guilty.
As Paul says, the official view of the state, MSM and all official bodies is that we are in a “climate emergency”. In this context, a jury may have thought that a few zealots attacking CO2 “polluters” were doing a good thing. If CO2 “deniers” had attacked a windmill or solar farm, they would have been convicted and imprisoned.
As to Mr Chauvin, he was convicted of murdering a man he did not hurt, and who was dying of a fentanyl overdose. There can be no doubt at all that the jury feared mob violence and death if they did not convict him. There was an argument that he should have asked for a trial before the judge alone, no jury, but who is to say the judge would not have also feared death? This is the way justice dies, aided and abetted by the so-called President of the United States. I don’t think things have been this bad since 1861.
Just a small jury-related point:
There truly was some element of fear that drove the jury to convict. But, I think perhaps a bigger factor was, this was a jury made up of Minneapolis residents. Minneapolis rivals Portland as far as being filled with lefty whackos. The average Minneapolis voter – which is where juror lists come from – is a socialist.
Jury selection is a method for each side to get rid of the outlier jurors on the other side. You get rid of the whacko righties and the whacko lefties, and you’re left with the middle.
But the middle of a group of Minneapolis residents is far to the left of what I would consider average in the US. And everything I’ve heard leaves me believing that this was a very lefty jury.
So they may simply have done what they firmly believed to be correct – to push back at The Evil Man cop in defense of the poor downtrodden blacks.
Heaven help their sanity if they ever figure out that it’s their own party and friends who have supposedly been keeping the blacks down so badly in Minneapolis, which hasn’t had a righty leader in decades.
Oops. Forgot to mention I was speaking about the Chauvin jury and not the ER jury. OT again.
Bobby:
Fair point about the batshit craziness of Minneapolis voters. Welcome to my world.
Would it have been a good idea to have gone for a trial before the judge? I believe Judge Cahill is a lefty, but as a judge he has to give reasons for his verdict. Hoping the mob does not kill him is not a valid reason for a guilty verdict.
What do you think Chauvin’s chances are on appeal? Again, the judges are not meant to let fear of their lives colour their verdict. They may even consider little things like facts. That would be nice.
I’ve long been rather curious as to why XR operatives are so rarely prosecuted for their crimes. My assumption has been that this is why: the police – correctly – doubt they’ll get a conviction.
It would make a lot of sense for the victims of this vandalism to point out the carbon footprint of the repairs that had to be made as a result. The MSM would not report it of course.
XR is the unworking sons and daughters of the rich and powerful.
The UK gov made moves to have them proscribed as a terror threat thanks to their behaviour and gateway to revolutionary Marxism. That soon stalled then reversed.
Paul said:
This is an extremely point. Trump won both the 2016 and 2020 elections by fighting. A conservative who fights the left TERRIFIES the left. Though Reagan did fight the Left to some extent, even he didn’t fight to the same extent and with the same tenacious ferocity that Trump fought the left.
As someone who PdH once called “Julius Evola without the anti-Semitism” which still to this day is among the compliments I’m most proud of ever having received, I will note that Trump’s failings stemmed from his reluctance to be genuinely ruthless. But he gave one helluva fight and gave me hope. A little.
@Shlomo,
Part of the reason Reagan didn’t fight so hard was because he didn’t need to – the decline of the US wasn’t so imminent or clear back then. The leftist march through the institutions wasn’t so thorough yet.
Trump fought hard because he had to.
But he still lost. Sucks to be you guys.
Give me China’s pragmatic fascism any day over the insane woke-ism in the West. The future is in the Sinosphere.
BTW, remember when there was debate here over whether China or India would be more successful? Well, the verdict isn’t in yet, but I think India would be going on the same trajectory as Brazil – always promising much but delivering little. Their COVID response is terrible, they’re in deep doo-doo now.
Take Kamala Harris, who has part-Indian ethnicity. Imagine a bunch of her ilk running a country.
That’s India.
Accelerationism is the path forward now. It’s a thin ray of hope, but at least it’s something.
Look at every single institution the Wokies have controlled for any length of time. Cities, organizations, school … all become dysfunctional and detrimental even to the Wokies themselves.
Like letting a 4-year-old eat all the candy she wants, the thing to do now is to let the Wokies make themselves sick. The chief Wokies won’t learn anything (because they already know their policies are insane) but the Wokie rank and file might come to some small measure of enlightenment.
Excellent example: US immigration. When 20 million Mexican Hispanics illegally immigrate to the US in the next few years, who is going to take it on the nose? All those working-class blacks who made such good progress in the Trump years are going to see their employment numbers tank. Will they learn not to eat so much candy before dinner?
@Ferox,
Nope, they’ll still blame it on Whitey. Not enough handouts, not enough opportunities, not enough tests watered down.
It’s always the White Man’s fault.
I doubt any judge would have stayed on board for a bench trial. With a jury trial, the judge gets to personally disavow any bad result. A bench trial puts it all on his shoulders – and judges go up for re-election here.
As for Chauvin’s chances on appeal – I wouldn’t hold my breath. An appeal based on jury issues is a tough appeal.
The first argument – that they should have changed venues to somewhere outside of the Twin Cities because the jurors here would know too much outside of the presented cases – goes nowhere when there’s no place within the state where they’d know less.
The second argument – that venue should have been changed so that you didn’t end up with jurors concerned with their own fate – could be supported if you get jurors willing to testify now that their vote was affected by fears of personal danger. Without such specific testimony, you’re just guessing, and appellate courts don’t give that much weight.
From my outside view, I didn’t see any egregious errors in any other aspects of Judge Cahill’s handling of the trial such that the Court of Appeals would overturn anything.
Some of the decisions in the trial that were based on testimony – what killed him, what did the cops see and do, etc. – might appear senseless to us outsiders, but these are questions of fact, and an appellate court won’t normally substitute its own judgment for what a jury decides. It will overturn legal decisions made by the judge – but the jury gets a ton of deference.
So, I don’t see (at this point) any great chances of success of an appeal. (But, more and more, these decisions seem to be made on political bases instead of legal ones, and those would be outside of my expertise.)
The people that get chosen for jury pools, and then even more so get selected for juries, are a special kind of stupid, on average. You don’t realize how many of your fellow citizens are below average in intelligence (believe me, it can seem well more than half!) People with a life, with things to do, to whom jury time is worse than a write-off, but a loss of opportunity tend to find ways to make sure they don’t get picked.
It’s amazing when the jury system works. And somewhat of a miracle.
The real problem is that a “jury of one’s peers” is not typically what you get. Jury pools should be constructed based upon the complexity of the legal issues and some metric of the jurist’s mental abilities and ethical history. But that isn’t what the authorities want, because smart juries are harder to sway, harder to fool, and more likely to give that nullification if they think the authorities are being abusive.
bobby b – Minnesota, or at least the Twin Cities, have been compared to Sweden. High tax, P.C. (“Woke”) and so on.
But Sweden did not have a lockdown – so Minneapolis is now officially inferior to Sweden.
Still there are the Germanic Dakotas to be considered – and if anyone doubts that North and South Dakota are rather Germanic, than get someone from North Dakota to say the word “yes”, listen to what they actually say.
By the way I like the Dakotas – and I like Germany and the Germans, I was treated with great kindness on my visit to Germany.
The Wobbly Guy.
The Mandate of Heaven will, eventually, change in China – the dictatorship is based on lies (preaching Marxism and practicing Corporatism) and everyone knowns it.
There will be bloodshed Sir – and there will be a lot of bloodshed.