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This week I wanted to write about blue-ribbon juries, a subject I touched on
a little last time. To fatten up my arguments I wanted to dive into the Net
and fish up some facts about juries today and yesterday, comments on them,
predictions and projections, and all the other things that would make it
look like I knew what I was talking about and wasn’t just making it up as I
went along. I would have melded this information with things I already
knew, like the deal last week where Al Sharpton got $200,000 from New York
City for police negligence in allowing him to be stabbed at a demonstration
in Brooklyn a few years ago. The city said there was no negligence, but
they couldn’t trust a jury not to find some, and it was better to settle and
give Al something to get him to go away and leave the city alone.
That’s the philosophical approach, I guess, and probably you can’t blame the
city attorneys for taking it, but if it were left to me I’d rather give up
the philosophy and try to find some ways to eliminate the kind of juries
that embody such a threat to the so-called true administration of justice.
The first thing that comes into the head of someone my age is the
reinstatement of the blue-ribbon juries that used to be called on to sit on
complex or sensational cases that required superior intelligence and
independence on the part of those rendering judgment.
Well that’s what I wanted to do, after first refreshing my recollection by
dredging up the necessary facts about those juries and what happened to them
anyway. I remembered it was the usual collusion between wise-guy lawyers
and slippery judges that brought them down and the usual excuse of
discrimination and prejudice and unequal treatment and so on that was
employed to do it. I wanted to fill in the details, though, and was on my
way to do it until I found out that my computer was down and wasn’t going to
tell me anything I wanted to know.
So today I consulted a book in my local library, "The Encyclopedia of the
American Constitution", which carried a lot of information about, yes, the
Constitution. I still wasn’t able to put my finger quite on the exact
moment when the Supreme Court ruled that it was prejudicial to select juries
on the basis of intelligence and experience rather than ignorance and
stupidity, but either it happened, or, as it appears, the Court just dropped
some hints and the lawyers and their pet judges picked up on them and
improved on them to rule out any consideration of merit as a qualification
to serve.
The result of all this is that we have juries like the one encountered by
William Buckley where the jurors had to be questioned by the judge whether
they’d read a newspaper article about their case. It turned out he needn’t
have worried because none of the jurors ever read a newspaper. Case after
case comes up where billions of dollars are handed out by people who have
never so much as opened a bank account. (Yes). And what about the juries
-- and the judges -- who came in with the Not Guilty verdict in the
Simpson trial and the mistrial in the first Menendez trial?
I’ll be going back to this subject again. You’re not supposed to write
about it and if you do, probably most of the people you reach will have
never heard of such a thing as a blue-ribbon jury, or if they have, they’ve
long forgotten about it, as they were intended to. You see, ideas like this
have simply been ruled out of order by the Opinion Trust and it’s bad
manners to bring them up. There is never any reference to them in print.
That’s the best way of suppressing unwholesome thoughts. Don’t fight about
them, just don’t leave them any room to exist. Down the memory hole with
them. Only fuddy-duds living in the past will recall them, and who needs
them?
Well, at the risk of being considered a complete back number I will in the
future try to resurrect the blue-ribbon idea, which was once part of the
landscape, an institution in fact, and taken for granted until the Johnny
Cockroaches of the legal profession went to work on it. And after that I
want to talk about the case for censorship, something equally constitutional
and useful, which at about the same time was also mugged behind closed doors
and which deserves another look today. I lived with both of these infamous
infringements on civil rights and never felt a flicker of fear. Neither did
anyone else that I ever heard of, but today I know there are people who will
be shocked and horrified just by the mention of them after they have been
buried at the crossroads with a stake through their hearts.
For readers who have the feeling I’ve just been shadow-boxing here and
haven’t really gotten to grips with my subject, I apologize with the
reminder that Christmas is two days off and I seem to still have money in my
wallet, indicating that I had better stop writing and start shopping before
I get gored by a reindeer. Merry Christmas all.
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