752
Food Not Bombs trial rescheduled after too many jurors objected to $500 fine for feeding homeless
(www.houstonchronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
752 points (98.8% liked)
News
23257 readers
3663 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You're not wrong, but when you get selected for jury duty the selecting lawyer will make inquiries about your knowledge on the subject and disqualify you if you admit knowing about it.
If you bring it up to the jury, that can also have you disqualified as well as anyone else the lawyers think were influenced by the discussion.
The third option is supposed to 'naturally' occurr, as in the jury agrees that the law was broken but the situation is so 'outside the scope of the law' that the law can no longer be applied. (IIRC the judge can overrule the jury in this case, but it can be a pain)
Essentially it's up to the judge to determine whether the jury's conclusion is within the realm of the 'third option'.
Yeah. That’s why people, who could be jurors, should be generally educated on the subject.
I was trying to be subtle.
I don't have the data to say one way or the other. I can definitely see how public knowledge of the third option can be abused, especially these days when political alignment is more important than facts to many people.
Good point
Which is why you just say you don't believe the prosecutors proved the case. Also, there's supposed to be a limit on the number of jurors lawyers can dismiss, for exactly this reason. They're spending well more than the cost of the fine just trying to empanel a jury at this point.
If we wanted a justice system that didn't waste money, we'd be authoritarian in nature.
The money wasted is to insure 'as even a case' as possible, regardless of the crime.
That's the idea anyway.
When I say wasting money here, I mean because you're not going to get a guilty verdict. Not in the authoritarian judge dredd sense. In fact, in other articles it's clear the city has brought a bunch of these cases and has gotten zero convictions.
So it really seems like someone decided they're going to win this one even if they have to go through 100 sessions of jury selection. (They've gone though about 30 so far)