Journal pudge's Journal: Stupid Juries 11
Via michellemalkin.com:
Denis Collins, one of the jurors, addresses the press. He identifies himself as a former reporter. "The primary thing that convinced us on most of the accounts was the alleged conversation with Russert...It was either false (didn't happen) or did happen...Mr. Libby was either told by or told to about Mrs. Wilson at least nine times...we believed he had a bad memory...but contradicted by testimony that he had an incredible grasp of details...even if he forgot who told him, it seemed very unlikely that he would have not remembered about Mrs. Wilson...tremendous amount of sympathy for Mr. Libby on the jury...jury asked "Where's Rove? Where's the other guys?" It seemed like he was the fall guy.
Two things.
First, the question "Where's Rove?" shows the jury had little clue what this case was about, because nothing whatsoever in this case had anything to do with any crime that Rove is alleged by anyone to have done. There is not any evidence whatsoever that Rove or anyone else, besides Libby in his perjury, committed any crime relating to this incident.
It clearly shows that the jurors were out to get someone, rather than to be impartial and fair. Who was it that filed charges, and who said that these were the only charges to be filed? It wasn't Rove. It was Fitzgerald. What really happened is that he spent years building a case and at the end found no crime had been committed that he could bring a case about. The only sense in which Libby might be considered a "fall guy" is that Fitzgerald had to make someone pay for his total failure to come up with an indictment in the original incident.
Second, the statement "we believed he had a bad memory" with "even if he forgot who told him, it seemed very unlikely that he would have not remembered about Mrs. Wilson" shows the jury either did not understand, or did not care about, the evidentiary threshold of criminal trials, which is "beyond reasonable doubt." His words there pretty clearly show that he is not sure whether Libby remembered it, but he found it "very unlikely" that he did not. That is sufficient for a civil trial, but not a criminal trial.
So much for justice.
Not that I am going to shed tears here. Chances are, Libby probably did lie. But justice demands that the charge is proven beyond reasonable doubt, and this one was not. There's plenty of reasonable doubt here. He says he simply forgot, and there's no evidence to show he didn't. If that's not reasonable doubt, then the phrase has lost all meaning.
So now people wonder whether Libby will be pardoned. Maybe, because an obvious miscarriage of justice was done here, and pardons are appropriate for that sort of thing. But most interesting in that question is that Libby was Marc Rich's lawyer, and played a role in Rich's pardon, which was the most infamous of Clinton's presidency. If Libby is pardoned by Bush, it won't be nearly as egregious as Clinton's pardoning of Rich, but it will be painted as such nontheless.
"I do not recall" (Score:2)
It's a shame though, that these days it seems perjury charges are only used to "get" people. Down here in Houston, it's pretty clear that the justice system needs some kind of second layer of prosecutors to prosecute the first layer's witnesses when they li
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Under this whacky fibbing law, some fed cop can come up to me and ask me if I have stolen a car.
My response of "No" is recorded in notes to be used against me later.
I am then accused of lying to the feds.
No car can be proven to have been stolen and no collusion of mine to steal a car can be proven, because the standards for proving a car has been stolen are too high for me to be prosicuted for that infraction, so I am prosicuted for lying about stealing a car.
I don't think that this example works well. Here's a modification.
A federal cop asks you if you talked to a car salesman about the stolen car. You said, well, he talked to me about it. But he says, no, we didn't talk about it at all.
Again, they cannot prove a car was actually stolen, but they can try to prove you didn't talk to the car salesman about the car that wasn't stolen. And they can try to prove that you knew you didn't when you said you did.
Of course, at the end of the day, they cannot prove e
Some thoughts about juries (Score:2)
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A point about criminal jury trials, while the burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, it is well within the purview of jurors to give different degrees of weight to the evidence. Not all evidence has to be treated equally in the eyes of the jury. So they essentially gave less weight to the bad memory and more weight to his "incredible grasp of details." It is well within their prerogative to determine what facts are most important, and how much credibility they will give to any one witness.
Fine, but at the end of the day, there was no justification for concluding, beyond reasonable doubt, that he was lying. It is perfectly reasonable for anyone to be looking at the evidence, weighted however you want to weight it, and conclude that it is reasonably possible that Libby was not lying.
As was said by a lawyer on NewsHour tonight [pbs.org]:
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I know very little about this case so I'm not going to try and interpret what the jury was thinking. However, I know that there are a lot of hurdles that must be jumped before a criminal case can even make it in front of a jury, let alone what the jury finds. Again, I'm not saying that I know what that is in this case, just that it must have cleared them.
And I cannot figure out how anyone could think this evidence does.
Juries can be strange animals, and they are often unpredicta
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One thing I have yet to encounter is a jury who did not take their job and their oath seriously. ... I'm not saying that that's the case here, I don't know, but I am saying that I would be very surprised if the jury did not truly think he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
No, you misunderstand me: I am not saying they did not take their oath seriously, but they simply did not arrive at a reasonable and intelligent conclusion, for whatever reasons.
Like, on that same PBS broadcast tonight, lawyer Richard Ben-Veniste said:
True en
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To be blunt, unless you were in the courtroom every day, listened to every witness, and examined every piece of evidence, then you have no way of saying that.
Doesn't it seem a bit conceited to think that you know more about the case than the lawyers, the judge, the grand jury, and the trial jury? Isn't a more likely answer that you're letting your own biases influence your judgement?
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I meant, they were wrong. They evidence they had did not surpass reasonable doubt.
To be blunt, unless you were in the courtroom every day, listened to every witness, and examined every piece of evidence, then you have no way of saying that.
To be blunt, that is bullshit. I am talking about the standard of evidence, the threshold required for conviction. This is not something you need to be in courtroom for.
Doesn't it seem a bit conceited to think that you know more about the case than the lawyers, the judge, the grand jury, and the trial jury?
No, not at all. I do not see having an informed opinion and believing others are wrong as similar to conceit. Did you think OJ was guilty? I did. And I was not in the courtroom every day. And I am convinced that the jury was wrong, and that the judge was wrong in many of his decisions. And I think anyone who doesn't agree with me o
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Forget more likely, it is demonstrably true that their biases impacted their decision based on the "the jury asked 'Where's Rove? Where's the other guys?'" is direct evidence they were preoccupied with things outside of the question in front of them.
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I think, rather, it is far more likely that the biases of the jury impacted their decision, because they found him guilty despite not having sufficient evidence to overcome reasonable doubt.
Forget more likely, it is demonstrably true that their biases impacted their decision based on the "the jury asked 'Where's Rove? Where's the other guys?'" is direct evidence they were preoccupied with things outside of the question in front of them.
I entirely agree they were "preoccupied with things outside of the question in front of them," but I am not entirely certain that the root of this preoccupation was bias. There could be other causes (for example, as some have said, confusing instructions).