I’m in the middle of writing a longer article on religion; but meantime, here’s an article from today’s Sydney Daily Telegraph that caught my eye, and which has serious implications for the administration of criminal justice in all countries whose system involves adversarial jury trials.
Ismail Belghar is believed to be the first Muslim in Australia to be granted a judge-only trial on the grounds that a jury may be biased because of his religious beliefs.
The decision in the New South Wales District Court can be revealed after Belghar, 36, yesterday pleaded guilty to detaining and assaulting his sister-in-law after she “dared” to take his wife to the beach without his permission.
The court heard, because of his religious beliefs and because he thought he had absolute authority over her, Belghar felt it “abhorrent” that his wife, Hanife Kokden, had been to the beach where she “displayed her body”.
In March, Judge Ronald Solomon had granted Belghar a trial before a judge sitting alone after agreeing he may not receive a fair trial with a jury.
“The attitude of (Belghar) … is based on a religious or cultural basis. In light of the fact there has been adverse publicity regarding people who hold extreme Muslim faith beliefs in the community, I am of the view that the apprehension by (Belghar) that he may not receive a fair trial is a reasonable apprehension,” Judge Solomon said.
In this country, it has always been a principle of criminal justice that a judge is the arbiter of law, but the jury is the arbiter of fact. I have served on juries myself and seen the naked bigotry some people are capable of summoning, to the point of wishing to deny natural justice to an accused whose guilt is, at a very minimum, based on questionable evidence.
But to extrapolate from there to decreeing that a jury of randomly chosen citizens is incapable of reaching a more just determination of fact than a judge, whose own background and prejudices may be even more biased, is to my mind a serious threat to Liberty.
Where will this lead next? Will Muslim citizens be barred from serving on juries in which an Anglo-Saxon is on trial? Will religious, or even genetic quotas become a feature of jury trials? The places to which this slippery slope may lead are as varied as they are frightening. You may think this fanciful. But I see it as the thin end of the wedge.
For some time in Australia’s Top End, Aboriginal defendants have had the option in cases involving certain criminal offences, to have their case tried in a normal state criminal court, or an indigenous court; the latter, administered by tribal elders, provides for what we might regard as quite barbaric punishments.
But this has always been regarded as a one-off concession to the historical and cultural circumstance of this continent’s traditional inhabitants. There is no way we want Sharia law, or any other balkanization of our criminal justice system, in this country.
What do you think of judge-only trials to circumvent community prejudice (real or imagined), and do you agree this development could be the prelude to worse? Personally, I would have less problem with judge-only trials if, like some U.S. states, we had judges elected by the citizenry. Or have we, by the twenty-first century, reached the point where we do not trust ourselves to administer justice to our own society, and we must defer to the wisdom of our betters?
Be Responsible - Be Free! 
On the serious side, it might be better to have such trials conducted before a panel of judges – three or five to keep the prospect of deadlocks to a minimum – in order to ensure (if nothing else) a degree of error-checking in the process.
To accord such determinative power to one man – in criminal cases particularly – gives rise to precedent I don’t think that any modern Western democratic civil society can or should tolerate.
On the facetious side, how about according people in other deviant populations – not just Islamic whackjobs but also serial rapists, fixated pedophiles, cannibals, banksters who’ve perpetrated Ponzi schemes and similar thieveries – to select the jurors empaneled in their trials from none but veniremen sharing their peculiar appetites and records of conduct?
Who’s better qualified than a dozen boozers each with a history of vehicular manslaughter while plastered to sit in judgement of the guilt or innocence of a guy who’s accused of having plowed his pick-up truck through a zebra crossing full of school children while under the influence of alcohol?
I have to agree with the judge here. Sadly in this day and age, we have a serious problem- Muslims are the new “Jews”. People see Muslims, and especially Arab Muslims as some kind of perpetual sleeper cell terrorist.
Sadly this is driven by a Zionist agenda (and a radical one at that as the moderates in the Zionist movement were shamed and ostracised into silence long ago) which tries to have the world believe that the Holocaust ONLY happened to the Jews, and that the Jews are a perpetual, innocent, persecuted minority, when the reality is far more disturbing.
The IDF was formed by a terrorist Triumvirate whose leading member, the Irgun, was only recognised by the Brittish to put down an Arab revolt caused by decades of war crimes (Al Qaeda and Libya anyone) and apartheid practices under the mandates system. In 1948 fearing the US would alter their position from supporting the partitioning of Palestine to supporting a continuation of the Mandates system; the fledgling IDF, comprised of the LEHI, Irgun and Stern Gang, executed Plan D which drove the Palestinians out of their homes (over 700,000 people were affected), by going through every single home in Palestine and raping women and girls and butchering their way through them. The IDF and Israeli government have been guilty of many atrocities, but some of the most notable were Ariel Sharon’s checkpoint policies which stationed the IDF’s elite paratroopers at checkpoints who would verbally and physically abuse male high school and university students purely because they could, and the First Intifada, which actually makes Tienanmen Square look positive in comparison.
The flip side of this is that this agenda tries to paint all fundamentalist Islamic groups as being on the same level of Al Qaeda. As Azzam Tamimi wrote in his book “Hamas: unwritten chapters”; the difference between the likes of Hamas and Al Qaeda is that unlike Al Qaeda, Hamas DOESN’T believe you need to burn the world down first and then rebuild it.
Simultaneous propaganda efforts by the US and the Brits, along with all their other lackeys including us, over oil, opium and the Suez Canal, have also pushed this agenda, through both bogus wars in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq on one end of the spectrum, and propping up malevolent dictators and supplying them arms in places such as Bahrain.
Sadly the attitudes behind the videos which have emerged of US soldiers gunning down Arab civilians for kicks in places like Iraq are driven by an attitude of “the only good rag head is a dead rag head”. I once met a girl in the RAN and was told by her that that attitude is fairly common amongst the defence forces (I’m not saying that attitude is shared by all, but that what was indicated to me was that it was very widespread).
Locally we have similar problems. The Islamic School debarcle in Camden where residents were up in arms because “we’re a Christian country” when many churches speak of their numbers actually being in decline.
The fact is that the “Jewish dog” has turned into the “rag-head terrorist” and the fact that the judge felt this move was necessary is extremely telling on just how bad this situation has gotten, that now even the authorities are now reacting to it.
Yes this is a dark day for our judicial system, but for completely different reasons than you suggest, by the very fact that it was even necessary to begin with.
The only way this will change is if every single Australian examines their knowledge of history and their attitude towards both Arabs and Muslims, and makes changes where they are needed – that’s something which will take a VERY long time to make happen.
In that case, don’t you regard it as a supreme irony that a judge with a surname like that could rule that ordinary citizens like you and me cannot be trusted to set aside any prejudice we may have against Muslims – but he can? Oz
I should have pointed out at the top that according to the article in the Telegraph,
However, as I understand it, a precedent has not thereby been set, and rulings similar to Judge Solomon’s could well reoccur.
“In that case, don’t you regard it as a supreme irony that a judge with a surname like that could rule that ordinary citizens like you and me cannot be trusted to set aside any prejudice we may have against Muslims – but he can? Oz”
Oz, the irony isn’t lost on me, and neither is the following fact. All too often with these situations, people knee jerk regarding the situation itself but the deeper issues get missed- largely because thanks to our educations system, people often have a grasp of history which is extremely flimsy at best.
I’m glad you’re doing that longer piece, because the larger question which needs to be asked is, why was there that need there even to begin with?
A question I have is this judge perchance of another minority religion and has a left wing bias? I hate to raise this this issue but it would seem that members of this other faith are going out of their way to make a mockery of our judicial system. The one that protects them from the other desert religion from just killing them, do they have a death wish?
You may make that inference; I couldn’t possibly comment – Oz
The problem is Kitler, that with the current state of play in our society, the reverse is the norm in society. How many people would go into jury selection with the attitude of “all arab muslims are nothing but a bunch of backwards, suicide-bombing camel jockeys” – the large minority if not the majority I’d wager?
Even if the judge is a left wing radical; that doesn’t change the fact that you have radical ignorant bigots out there in great numbers who are the legitimate reason why the judge had this concern to begin with.
Tucci what you are proposing is the European continental system of justice where you are guilty before being found innocent and everything is forbidden unless expressly okayed by law. You do realize that the idea of parliaments or allthings like juries comes out of the Scandinavian tradition yet you wish for a roman based totalitarian law system, I find it telling how people jump on this issue depends on their backgrounds, I was raised in a Scandinavian area of the UK so to me democracy and justice through trial by my peers comes naturally so do the Irish because of the viking influence. Yet you opt for the other why is that? The jury system is not perfect but it is better than the alternative.
I daresay Tucci was being a bit tongue-in-cheek. But you raise a point I had not considered: under the old Anglo-Saxon Law of Frankpledge, local societies were organised into tythings (from Old Norse “ten-assemblies” – to this day the Norwegian parliament is known as the Thing (!) ) of ten households each. Each tything was collectively responsible for any crimes committed by one of their number, and many criminal cases were held in the manorial court-leet, which is the origin of the English jury system – Oz
Ozboy I only asked because this is the second judge recently in Oz that has pursued such outlandish positions. I suspect it is the same here in the USA that they have bought into the whole stupid leftist mindset it must be a 60’s thing, life will be simpler when they retire. I suspect the younger generation are not so damned gullible.
Andrew Richards actually you are wrong a lot of people would go into a jury with an open mind however i have heard enough tales where it is a minority member of the jury that stirs up the racial shit and stops the case being decided on facts but emotions. If OJ Simpson has murdered a black woman and the jury had been black he would have been sentenced to death, however because the case took on unnecessary racial overtones rather than that of a jealous ex husband he got to walk free.
I would defy anyone with an ounce of human compassion to sit on the jury of this case and feel no emotion – irrespective of how prejudiced or otherwise they may be. It isn’t a reason to snatch ultimate judicial power away from the citizenry; that way lies the Rule of Authority – Oz
Actually Kitler, I’m right Being in the US, I think what you fail to grasp is that the anti-Muslim sentiment here in Austrlia is getting to similar levels as what anti-African American sentiment is in some parts of the South in the USA. Need I remind you of the Cronulla riots a few years back spurred on by the very same talkback radio that “the man on the street” here gets their politics from, or the Camden Islamic school debacle where a bunch of rednecks there were mouthing off about how “this is a Christian Couthry”. These are just 2 examples of the racist scumbaggery that a very large number of Australians adhere to- if not in deeds, then definitely in words and with the flames fanned by both sides of politics going on about “border protection” in the same manner as their predecessor in hijacking Pauline Hanson on the subject; John Howard. We may not have the KKK or lynch mobs operating here to attack Arab Muslims, but we might as well have.
You combine that with a trial involving a Sharia Law scenario and it doesn’t take a genuis to see the problem here.
“I would defy anyone with an ounce of human compassion to sit on the jury of this case and feel no emotion – irrespective of how prejudiced or otherwise they may be. It isn’t a reason to snatch ultimate judicial power away from the citizenry; that way lies the Rule of Authority – Oz”
I completely agree that fears of racism accusations should never be allowed to be used as a shield. However the issue here is how tainted a jury might bein passing deliberations. Considering the anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment here, spurred on by redneck mouthpieces like Alan Jones and John Laws on the airwaves, and both sides of politics using border protection for political point-scoring; the concerns over a mistrial due to a tainted jury are highly valid.
If we really want this issue to be resolved, then we as a society need to be taking a long hard look in the mirror regarding how we as a country view Arabs and Muslims.
No.
I’ve lived in Australia too, Andrew. Longer than you. My Italian barber, by way of comparison, has lived here longer than me. I’ve travelled and worked the length and breadth of this country, and befriended CEOs in boardrooms, junkies in gutters, politicians, aboriginal stockmen and tribal elders, miners, shearers, farmers, surfies and dole bludgers, prisoners, terminal patients in hostels, bikies, Lebanese gang members and a thousand members of the clergy. So I believe I can speak on this particular subject with a certain authority.
There is bigotry in Australia, yes. Some. But it’s far less than any other country I’m aware of, and if you really do believe it’s as bad as the Old South of the USA, then I’d say you should get out more. Try for starters, the bigotry rampant in South Asia. The caste system. Or the bigotry of the Han Chinese. Tribal bigotry in Africa, bigotry of so many European-descended Latin Americans towards their indigenous countrymen, bigotry of the French Quebecois towards their Anglophone minority…
I could go on (and on, and on). If you truly are against jury trials on account of the level of bigotry of ordinary Australians, then you are against jury trials all over the world. Unless you want a morass of “special case” legislation, which is the antithesis of the egalitarianism for which our nation is rightly famed – Oz
The koran (4:34) clearly permits men to beat disobedient wives. The woman was disobedient and thus he felt fully justified in beating a women – he only chose the wrong one, whoops. It would not be fair for him to be tried by an awful, prejudiced Australian jury that might have disgusting (zionist plot) ideas such as gender equality and a woman’s right to freedom of movement!
As a secular liberal, I’m finding myself being called ‘right wing’ for wanting to maintain our mainstays of freedom of speech, gender equality, gay rights and secularism. Why are other feminists and liberals so protective of an ideology that combines religion with mysogenistic, homophobic, anti-muslim and antisemitic rules and inhumane punishments? And giving this man a non-jury trial would be protective of his outdated belief system.
G’day Susanne, and welcome to LibertyGibbert.
From the Fourth Sura:
A lot of other “minority” groups which tend to congregate under the umbrella of the Left are running into this same problem. Activist gays are waking up to the reality of treatment of homosexuals in the Middle East. Feminists are wrestling with the issues you describe. At some point, these folks are going to have to confront some hard decisions – Oz
“The koran (4:34) clearly permits men to beat disobedient wives. The woman was disobedient and thus he felt fully justified in beating a women – he only chose the wrong one, whoops. It would not be fair for him to be tried by an awful, prejudiced Australian jury that might have disgusting (zionist plot) ideas such as gender equality and a woman’s right to freedom of movement!”
Susanne, you should do yourself a favour and learn about 20th Century Middle Eastern History, before making such an argument that makes you lose all credibility.
It’s funny you talk about gender equality in some anti-Arab apologist argument. Tell me, what about the hundreds of thousands of women and underage girls raped by the Militant Zionist IDF in the summer of 1948? What about the systematic officially ordered child abuse at checkpoints, the shoot to kill orders against not only unarmed men but unarmed women and children by the IDF in the first Intifada? What about the scores of women and little girls who literally had limbs burned off by the IDF’s use of white phosphorus in their last incursion into the Middle East? That’s not even going into the way zionist historian’s like Benny Morris justify the atrocities of 1948 by reducing the genocide against American Indians, including lopping off women’s breasts to make tobacco pouches, as “collateral damage for the world getting Western Democracy. Then you have the way women being raped in Arab societies is a terrible psychological weapon of shame for the men involved- not because of the woman’s value, but because of their faliure to protect the woman from it. Or do the issues facing Arab Muslim women not matter to you the moment things are looked at from a Zionist perspective?
The thing which noone here seems to get, is that not only are these atrocities just the tip of the iceberg, but that most people have never become aware of them, because all they hear is the like that “well they’re all just millitants”, so they don’t even bother looking at the larger picture.
For someone who clearly declares who clearly declares herself to be arguing from such a strong feminist perspective, you really do need to educate yourself on just what millitant Zionism has done to Arab women.
And that’s the problem – your fallacious sarcasm, if the jury was prejudiced, the man in question would have every right to have a mistrial declared. Because regardless of the nature of the crime,under the very legal system you seem so keen to argue in favour of, a person must be judged on the crimes they have committed and the evidence available; not on their ethnicity.
“I could go on (and on, and on). If you truly are against jury trials on account of the level of bigotry of ordinary Australians, then you are against jury trials all over the world. Unless you want a morass of “special case” legislation, which is the antithesis of the egalitarianism for which our nation is rightly famed – Oz”
Oz, your entire post here is utterly ironic, when my concern is based on one of the fundamental pillars of our legal system- that people are innocent until proven guilty and fairly juddged by a jury of their peers based on the evidence.
At no point did I say that I was against jury trials, just that things have clearly reached the point of becoming a serious problem in terms of racism when a judge has concerns about racial prejudice involving a mistrial. In fact the only thing I said was that considering the level of anti-Arab sentiment in this country, I can understand why the judge would have made such a move and that if we’re really concerned about the problem, then there’s alot we need to take a good look at in society.
If you’re asking what I personally feel needs to happen; in cases like this we should pre-screen jurors for potential tendencies of bigotry and if they show up, automatically remove them from selection. However practically that wouldn’t be something which could be set up overnight.
Andrew, peremptory challenges to jurors are already a feature of jury trials in Australia, as well as in the USA. I’ve been through the process myself. One court officer in Sydney told me (after I’d been empanelled :evil:) that if you want to be bumped from a jury, just show up with a folded copy of The Bulletin under your arm: it’s a kind of code.
“your entire post here is utterly ironic… people are innocent until proven guilty”?
Yes. They are. So are the Australian citizenry – Oz
“There is bigotry in Australia, yes. Some. But it’s far less than any other country I’m aware of, and if you really do believe it’s as bad as the Old South of the USA, then I’d say you should get out more. Try for starters, the bigotry rampant in South Asia. The caste system. Or the bigotry of the Han Chinese. Tribal bigotry in Africa, bigotry of so many European-descended Latin Americans towards their indigenous countrymen, bigotry of the French Quebecois towards their Anglophone minority…”
Oz, I’ve lived in Australia for over 30 years and in that time, I’ve seen plenty on my own including what the “middle class” values have become in recent years. The fact is that as much as you might wish otherwise there is a mountain of anti-Muslim xenophobia out there in the community, which is not unlike the “civilised” racial inequality in parts of the Old South. However even if it’s not that bad; what does it say about a discussion on discrimination when we start saying “it’s not as bad as it is in other countries so it’s not really an issue”. The fact that we had the Cronulla riots; the fact that we have massive public opposition from the redneck crevice of society when someone wants to open an Islamic school in an area; the fact that the govt has people whipped into a state of fear about the perpetual sleeper cell terrorist hiding in a boat owned by people smugglers; says that we have a massive problem on our hands- globally one reminiscent of attitudes towards the Jews in the late 19th century to the early 20th Century.
The notion that we don’t have a serious problem there, so serious that a judge felt the need to shift away from a jury trial based on the nature of the crime and ethnicity of the individual responsible; is nothing short of naive.
Very well, Andrew. Nothing I can say will sway your opinions, I expect. I leave it for others to judge who is being naïve. Or worse – Oz
“Andrew, peremptory challenges to jurors are already a feature of jury trials in Australia, as well as in the USA. I’ve been through the process myself. One court officer in Sydney told me (after I’d been empanelled 👿 ) that if you want to be bumped from a jury, just show up with a folded copy of The Bulletin under your arm: it’s a kind of code.”
The problem is that as far as I’m aware, there are only a set number of challenges which can be made to a panel. Suppose you wind up with a completely tainted pool and run out of challenges- how can you wind up with an imparial jury?
That’s the problem you seem to be missing here.
““your entire post here is utterly ironic… people are innocent until proven guilty”?
Yes. They are. So are the Australian citizenry – Oz”
Again at no point did I say that ALL Australians were too bigotted to sit on jury trials of this nature; merely that the problem is large enough that a judge has felt that the standard process would not result in a fair trial. Furthermore if we were to psychologically screen jurors for things like bigotry in these cases before they went forwards for selection, then how would that be anything other than just adding another layer to the jury selection process?
I admire your innocent trust in the wisdom and impartiality of our unelected judiciary, over the anti-Muslim rabble you seem to regard the rest of us Aussie citizens to be. As I’m friends with a NSW Supreme Court judge, I probably shouldn’t elaborate 🙄
An infinite number of peremptory juror challenges?
Someone please give Andrew the one-sentence version of why not. I’m going to bed – Oz
“I admire your innocent trust in the wisdom and impartiality of our unelected judiciary, over the anti-Muslim rabble you seem to regard the rest of us Aussie citizens to be. As I’m good friends with a NSW Supreme Court judge, I probably shouldn’t elaborate :roll:”
Again, I never said that every single other Australian harboured anti-Muslim and Anti-Arab racist beliefs, just that there is a large percentage of the community does, which is the reason why the judge in question moved to have the case exempted from a panel of jurors. Do two wrongs make a right? Certainly not, however no problem in history has been solved by dismissing or ignoring it.
“An infinite number of peremptory juror challenges?
Someone please give Andrew the one-sentence version of why not. I’m going to bed – Oz”
Or alternately here’s why as for someone who seems to keen to quote their legal connections, you forget the core tenant of our legal system- the presumption of innocence: that it is better for x number of guilty men to go free, than for a single innocent man to be imprisoned. Again, I was not arguing that lawyers should have the right to infinite challenges; merely that when you have a situation where there is a serious issue with racism in the community, that ignoring the possiblity for the maximum number of challenges being exceeded and for there still to be a tainted jury, is nothing short of naive. In fact I fail to see why my solution, which would be for pre-screening of jurors for racist beliefs before they even go up for selection, would be open to exploitation in any way shape or form, short of the clinical psychologist being involved being corrupt.
It seems to me that we are overlooking the basic question, racism doesn’t – or shouldn’t – come into it.
Do the religious beliefs of anyone overwrite the law of the land? Surely nobody, whether born in that country or an immigrant, has the right to break the law. I know it’s a very simplistic view and that there are many subtleties involved but I cannot believe there is any basis for overturning both side’s right to a trial by jury. When becoming a citizen one automatically takes on the mores, rights and responsibilities of the chosen country, religious freedom is fine as long as that doesn’t adversly affect those.
I believe some Jainist monks believe they have to live their lives without the benefit of wearing clothes…….not sure how that would go down!
I’m glad the request was denied. Give me “Twelve Good Men” any day, I’d take my chances.
The celtic/viking legal philosophy is communal. A jury of your peers represented a collective administration of justice by the society as a whole, or at least via their selected representatives. And the assumption was that those judging were equal members of the group. This all works best if the society is relatively homogeneous. The underlying theory behind adversarial justice with a jury of your peers fails if the defendant has very different concepts of criminality, justice or law, or cannot afford a goof champion to fight his corner….
Roman style legal systems are built on the authoritarian, or hierarchical version of social order. The peers of a criminal are certainly NOT considered suitable to sit in judgement. ‘Obviously'(sic) it requires a more qualified, better, richer man with a higher social authority to pass judgement.
The two systems are obviously mutual contradictory over the issue of who has legitimacy to pass judgement. Although the communal/scandinavian has ceded the allocation of punishment to an authority figure while keeping the adversarial and jury elements.
I don’t know which type of justice system Libertarians might favour. Both the communal and authority philosophies seem antithetical to Libertarian principles?!
When society is NOT homogeneous, but the same system of justice is applied to all there may be an argument in favour of a judge seen as independent and accountable rather than the difficulty of finding true ‘peers’ of the defendant who will not only avoid discrimination but also apply the common law consistently.
I take Andrew’s point that a strong bigotry in society towards a specific ethnic/religious group can result in legalised persecution of that minority if juries are prone to convict on the beliefs or ethnic origin of a defendant rather than his actions.
Some sort of affirmative action in that situation may be tempting, but is an admission that society is inherently inequitable. A judge, or judge panel may be the least worst option, although if society is that ‘toxic’ any solution will be inadequate.
As a general rule I think it is only justified to dispense with a jury if the specific case has aroused very strong community responses. A child-killer or serial rapist might find it impossible to get a ‘fair’ jury trial because of the specific animosity felt in that case. Finding any jurors who can be neutral may be impossible.
But it is completely unacceptable for there to be a general change in the application of the law because of any specific belief system the defendant might hold. Just because your actions are motivated by your adherence to a set of social rules written by bronze-age nomadic pastoralists coming to terms with settled city civics does not absolve an individual from punishment from breaking current law.
Cultural diversity, and multiculturalism ideas have spawned a respect for ethnic/religious differences that traps people within their tribal history. It denies the ability of any individual to act independently and judges people not on their personal intentions, but according to historical legacies which it would be better to encourage people to abandon rather than use as a justification for actions unacceptable in modern societies.
The notion that a person can progress, reject their ‘heritage’ and learn new ways of living and behaving is abandoned as a social good in favour of a idiotic respect for cleaving unthinkingly to historical traditions.
France has a secular social system that accepts that people will have different beliefs, but grants no benefit to one belief over another. Actions that result from a venerable religious tradition have no more validity as a mitigation for illegal acts than actions that result from bee-keeping or supporting a particular football team.
If in the present case the argument is that the bigotry is such that this individual could not receive a fair trial then avoiding a jury may be required for this specific case. But if the claim is that their beliefs should be considered as a factor in the mitigation of their actions… NO!
“I don’t know which type of justice system Libertarians might favour. Both the communal and authority philosophies seem antithetical to Libertarian principles?!”
You’ve hit the nail on the head, Izen. My resolution to the paradox is that under the Anglo-Saxon model, justice was indeed administered collectively, but locally, on a very small scale. In fact, on that scale, I’d use the word co-operatively instead of collectively. Maybe the combination of jury determination of innocence or guilt, and learned judges determining law and punishment, is the “least worst” model we have yet come up with – Oz
@Meltemian, the issue here isn’t whether religious practices should trump the law- clearly they shouldn’t. The issue here is that the strong anti-Muslim sentiment in this country has created a situation where there is a strong potential for a tainted jury.
@izen You say “But it is completely unacceptable for there to be a general change in the application of the law because of any specific belief system the defendant might hold.”
I get what you’re trying to say here, but here’s the thing. Granted there is definitely a line where freedom of religious expression crosses over into illegality and noone should be above the law because of their religion (except where repressionist laws have been passed for the purposes of religious persecution). However when there is such a potential for someone to be judged based on their ethnicity or religious beliefs rather than the evidence, then I’d argue that there is a shortfall in the legal system which needs addressing. This shortfall is nothing new and it has been something which has gone on for far too long in the legal systems of far too many countries.
The idea of challenges has been to remove jurors who may be so biased as to cause a potential mistrial, however to avoid misuse, limits were set. However when you have a completely tainted jury pool, you still face the same situation. Much like when appeals were introduced to deal with the issues of poor verdicts; there needs to be a change to the jury system. What we need to do is before jurors even go up for selection, is to screen them for racist tendencies with a court appointed and neutral clinical psychologist, in any cases where race might be a factor.
That way concerns would be dealt with, while not presenting a shield for criminals to exploit.
Maybe it should be pointed that a lot of judges really are arseholes and for those of you wishing to appeal directly to teacher sorry the judge may consider that fact. A jury of ten people can reflect multiple opinions whereas one judge represents one very biased opinion and heaven help you if they have had a bad day.
As for Andrew Richards while you are entitled to your opinion why do I suspect you are a recent convert to the religion of peace as you are hell bent on implementing the Sharia court system. As for bias unfortunately it’s everywhere and everyone is, I have my own pet hates and groups of people I despise but you know what when it came to a court case I would do my level best to judge the case on the facts not my own beliefs especially if it was a murder case.
As for wife beating sanctioned under Islam let me run that by the missus and see how far that one goes, I suspect I shall be sleeping on the sofa for a month or three. I don’t care what anyone says Islam is a barbaric backwards religion.
At 4:51 PM on 9 May, Kitler had accosted me with:
Presuming that it’s not my facetious proposal (f’rinstance, let accused arsonists be judged by juries made up entirely of pyromaniacs) but rather the serious one – to prefer a panel of judges (odd in number to better avoid deadlock) to a single judge making the determination of guilt or innocence in the criminal case at hand – Kitler should be appraised of the fact that my thoughts running in this vein had nothing to do with “the European continental system of justice” but rather what gets done in courts-martial under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) in these our United States.
As a longstanding supporter of the Fully Informed Jury Association, I not only agree with the contention that “The jury system is not perfect” but I also advocate some wonderfully solid and effective ways to make it as close to absolutely “perfect” as is feasible in this vale of tears.
If an American wants to get out of jury duty, he need not dick around with spurious claims of familial necessity or medical disability, but simply respond to the summons with an eager acceptance and a letter stating that as an enthusiastic member of the FIJA he’ll be delighted to bring along a ton of the Association’s educational materials and disseminate them throughout the pool of veniremen awaiting empanelment as members of the jurisdiction’s grand and petit juries.
Just delighted.
Helpfully include with the letters samples of the FIJA brochures.
“Sorry, citizen, but you’re excused duty. Go away. Never come back. Get the hell out of here!”
Of course, if you’re not seeking to avoid the imposition of sitting on your ass on uncomfortable county or state or federal furniture, just show up with a sackful of those subversively truthful goodies and provide your fellow sufferers with interesting reading material.
Ain’t real democracy more fun than the proverbial barrel of mercury fulminate?
The Bulletin is a lot simpler – Oz 😆
At 11:00 PM on 9 May, izen had observed:
Suddenly my facetious proposal (above) sounds very sensible. Consider that “child-killer” – presumably a sexual predator – in the dock before a jury composed wholly of people diagnosed as fixated pedophiles, folks who genuinely and intimately understand such paraphilic appetites.
Can’t say that their predispositions – and their own “very strong community responses” – could disqualify them from sitting in judgement, right? If anything, they have special expertise far and away superior to that of anybody else, psychiatrist or judge or member of the general public.
Likely such a panel of pedophiles would be far more apt to look upon the forcible rape and/or murder of a child as heinous when they themselves have spent lifetimes controlling such impulses.
Of course, when it comes to merely murdering a child, any parent who has successfully resisted that natural, normal, and understandable impulse to drag a sackful of squirming snotnose out into the woods with a shovel long enough to get his or her own kids to majority would certainly qualify.
At 2:32 AM on 10 May, Kitler betrayed his fatal ignorance of Islamic religious dogma, culture, custom, and law, writing:
Don’t conflate Western standards of conduct for those of the Religion of Peace and its adherents.
Were “the missus” in a family of good Muslims to get a hammering from hubbie, she would be the one “sleeping on the sofa for a month or three” – or more likely on the floor at the foot of the marital bed – not her lord and master.
In getting a solid lock on the malignancy of Islam, we of the gentle and overwhelmingly Christian-influenced modern West are badly handicapped by our assumptions of what is and is not moral conduct among people who appreciate the nature of the individual human being and therefore the concept of human rights.
They ain’t like us. That’s not xenophobia on our part, but plain dispassionate recognition of reality.
Heck, the Allah-shouting whackjobs glory in the fact that they ain’t like us “decadent infidels.” Why the hell d’you think that they call the rest of the world – the world outside of Dar al-Islam, their own community of squabbling Mecca-marchers – “Dar al-Harb,” literally “the House of War”?
Surely prospective jurors are innocent of the charge of being racist until proven guilty. Andrew Richards is simply demonstrating his own prejudice.
I forgot to mention that Andrew Richards also demonstrates his approval of double standards: that is essentially what he is arguing in favour of. Clearly the concept of one law for all is unacceptable to him : a misinformed sense of superiority perhaps. Andrew knows best!
Andrew’s view is that anti-Muslim prejudice in Australia is so widespread, and so virulent, that Muslims accused of crimes cannot be fairly tried by juries. I have presented a different view of prejudice as it exists in Australia, and I leave it to you all to make up your mind between us. When or if you ever travel Down Under, as our GE is at the moment, you will have the chance to see for yourselves.
Such prejudice as does exist here (extremely minor, compared to elsewhere on earth, as I said above), is hardly confined to white prejudice against Muslims. If I were a Greek defendant, I’d be very nervous if there were any Macedonians or Turks on my jury. There’s the usual dollop of anti-semitism lurking somewhere beneath the surface. I have been told by Croats that in their language, the word for “Serbian” is regarded as a swear word. We have large communities of both, and when their ethnically-based soccer teams meet in our local league, it gets rather, um, “animated”. Wouldn’t want that other lot on my jury, eh? Indians and Pakistanis, Tamil and Sinhalese, Sunnis and Shia, on and on, it’s the same here as it is in any multi-cultural society. You can’t fixate on just one prejudice, and how would that square with jury selection?
What about those who try to hide their prejudice in order to be empanelled on, and taint, a jury deciding a case of someone they don’t like? What about those who’ve anglicized their names, or women who have married out of their ethnic group? If Andrew isn’t against jury trials per se, to what lengths would he be prepared to investigate the backgrounds of each potential juror? He states above (on a Libertarian blog!) that he would like to see a psychological evaluation of every potential member of a jury pool. Where “race might be a factor”. As opposed to gender, physiognomy, sexual preference, political beliefs…
It all sounds just a bit impractical to me; not to mention discriminatory and totalitarian – Oz
So far only Meltemian’s comment has been pertinent. I did, however, enjoy Tucci’s comment about FIJA (I had not heard of them before). In the US the vast majority of criminal and civil cases never go jury trial. Most civil cases are settled out of court. Most criminal cases are plea bargained down. Many criminal cases are heard by just a judge. It is not at all unusual. Magistrate judges almost never sit juries. It all depends on the nature of the charges and the intents and desires of the prosecution and the defense.
I was rather taken aback to encounter vile antisemitism here at this site. We dance around this issue is the US, but we may as well face it head-on – primarily (but not exclusively) only Muslims demand separate laws. We have virtually every sect of Christian faith here in the US. We have Jews. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, etc. (and that’s just in my community).
Libertarians generally recognize and respect the rule of law. That is, it should be just as illegal for me to beat my wife as it is for Abdulla Bulbul Amir irrespective of his Muslim faith. There is one law and violation of same should result in equal criminal liability. Sadly, it doesn’t always work out this way. Down in south Florida there are a bunch of followers of Santeria. Part of this barbaric religion is animal sacrifice. There are laws against animal cruelty and these Santerians routinely violate them in the name of religious freedom. According to Wikipedia, “In 1993, the issue of animal sacrifice was taken to the United States Supreme Court in the case of Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye v. City of Hialeah. The court ruled that animal cruelty laws targeted specifically at Yoruba were unconstitutional. The Yoruba practice of animal sacrifice has seen no significant legal challenges since then.” We have other incongruencies in our application of “the law” when it comes to Native Americans that are based on religious freedom. Native (literally card-carrying) Navajo are allowed to use mescaline in their ceremonies. Peyote is a C-I prohibited controlled substance for every other American (even other Indians). Recently a judge ruled that some tribe up in Montana (or thereabout) are permitted to kill a certain number of protected, endangered eagles for use in their religious practices.
Now, I don’t care about the Peyote exemption granted to the Navajo. They’re not harming anyone or anything else. I bristle at the killing of eagles. Particularly annoying is that they will shoot these eagles with modern rifles equipped with scopes rather bow and arrow. Further, they will likely drive out to the eagle nesting sites in pick up trucks rather than walking or riding horses. Their religion demands the death of an eagle while their “native culture” has no problem with TV, electricity, internal combustion engines or monthly government checks. I go nuts over the animal torture and sacrifice of Santeria. These group claim protection by claiming their First Amendment right to freedom of religion. Personally I think the 14th Amendment guarantee of equal application of justice sort of trumps most claims of religious freedom, particularly in cases where the practices of a religion violates established laws.
Interesting Dave, that your national faunal symbol is rare and endangered, whereas mine is in plague proportions and I don’t hesitate to shoot them. Both are magnificent creatures, particularly when in full flight, but there you go – Oz
At 5:50 AM on 10 May, Dr. Dave had complained:
As a libertarian myself, I tend a helluva lot less to accord sanctified status to statues and regulations and similar governing class assertions of intrusive power for no reason other than that they’re “established laws.”
I draw attention to Bismark’s observation about the making of laws and sausages.
Anent Haliaeetus leucocephalus and 16 U.S.C. 668-668d, I don’t see one goddam bit of justification for yelping about a stipulated limited number of such avian carrion-seekers getting cleanly plugged for their plumage by Jeep-riding aborigines with coolers full of canned love-in-a-canoe beer for that celebratory Miller Time moment after the poultry is plucked. These birds of arguable omen are replenishing themselves more than sufficiently to allow such culling.
As for the method of that culling….
I’ve no doubt that at the pivotal moment when the bow came into use, there were tribal elders in these neolithic cultures who groused at the violations of sacred custom involved in employing something other than the time-tested and honorable atl-atl to assassinate a representative of the tribal totem.
“Ain’t you uppity whippersnappers got no respect for tradition?”
Ozboy,
Are you referring to the emu or the red kangaroo? I didn’t know either could fly! We have several species of eagle. Only the bald eagle is our national bird. I honestly don’t know if we have any other “national” animals or anything else for that matter. Individual states have state birds, state animals, state flowers, state rocks, state mottoes, state trees, etc.
Here in Santa Fe we have more art galleries per capita than anywhere in the world. Some years ago agents from US Fish & Wildlife raided an art gallery that was displaying an Indian headdress made of crow feathers. I went to the USFW website and couldn’t believe what I found. It is illegal to pick up the feather of virtually any bird in the US. You can hunt pheasant and eat them but technically you can’t do anything with their feathers. Virtually every species of bird in this country is “protected” to some extent. Technically it illegal to shoot crows in your own cornfield.
Lots of birds are hunted – goose, ducks, certain cranes, pheasant, quail, dove and probably a few others. But you can’t legally kill or capture any other wild bird…even nuisance birds. Some of this was enacted many years ago to prevent the decimation of bird populations for their plumage back when wearing bird feathers was fashionable.
Roos. Male Great Reds are known as “boomers” and females are called “blue flyers”. Boomers can grow up to 7 feet in height and weigh up to 300 pounds, hence it’s the name of our national men’s basketball team.
Forester (Eastern Grey) kangaroos are the largest species down here in Tasmania – I’ve only ever shot one Great Red, and that nearly 30 years ago – Oz
Oz twice mentions “The Bulletin” as a magical fetish with which to ward off compulsory service as venireman and juror – in Australia, I assume? – without explaining or linking to any source of information about what the hell “The Bulletin” is supposed to be, and why it should be treated as anathema by the courts in his commonwealth.
Forgive me, Tucci – wiki entry here. It’s been out of publication since 2008, so I imagine Quadrant has replaced it as a get-out-of-jury-service passport – Oz
Over here in my corner of these United States, say “The Bulletin” to anyone my age and we flash instantly upon The Philadelphia Bulletin, which went out of print twenty years ago to leave the City of Brotherly Love to the local edition of Pravda, calling itself The Philadelphia Inquirer.
And its tabloid stablemate, the Delaware Valley’s version of Komsomolskaya Pravda, alias The Daily News.
As I recall, our Bulletin had a pretty good sports section and great comics pages. A helluva lot better than what the Inky published. How about yours?
I served two 3-month stints in the jury pool for the First District petit criminal court. Every Friday you had to call a number to see if you had to show up the following Wednesday for jury selection. On the first day we are told in no uncertain terms NOT to bring a newspaper or news magazine into the courthouse. I wonder how they feel about iPhones. What would be to stop any juror from turning on their phone during a break and checking out the news on the internet?
Getting out of serving in the pool is rather difficult but I discovered a couple tricks to get out of getting selected as a juror. One case was that of a heroin addict and his defense attorney wasa trying to paint his addiction as a disease and not really his fault. My hand shot up. When I was called on I stood up and explained that anyone in the room could use heroin once, twice or even several times and not become addicted. Continued chronic use leading to addiction is the result of a conscious decision and not a blameless disease. I was not selected as a juror. The next time around I just did my best to keep my mouth shut. The case was one involving domestic abuse. Eventually they called on me to ask if I had any personal experience with domestic violence. I said “no.” The attorney said, “really? No experience at all?” I replied, “Well…I was married for nearly 11 years so I can’t say that I never fantasized about it.” This got a laugh out of everybody (including the judge). Again, I was not selected as a juror.
Dr Dave why is no one allowed to question anything that Jewish people do and say? They are no less human and not more so either. The holocaust was over 77 years ago but somehow that is used as the catch all to stifle any and all criticism, you immediately jump on the antisemitism bandwagon yourself as a reflex action. The point I made last night was the death wish of two Jewish judges in Australia that have recently wanted to ban free speech and in this case make Muslims a special case and trying to give them greater rights than the rest of us. The same Muslims that despise and hate Jews for scriptural reasons in the Koran hence the death wish.
So why can’t I criticize two left wing leaning Jewish judges because i think they hate western culture and are trying to destroy it for whatever victim-hood inspired mentality they are displaying. Has no one told them that we were the good guys that destroyed the Nazi’s, because if they think we are the bad guys then they need to emigrate.
Wow, an immediate ad hominem attack from AR as soon as I post here (to which my only answer is ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’ – applies to every western wrong people bring up in response to current islamic violence).
But also a warm greeting, thank you Oz.
Kitler, I think you can criticize anyone. I think in this case multicultural ideology and perhaps a fear of being seen as unfair to the defendant led the judge. Similar to liberals who feel constantly guilty for being westerners and thus lose track of the values we have slowly established over the centuries.
‘Religious freedom’ does not trump human rights and the laws of the land.
Strange and usually unpleasant things happen when cultures and ethnicities collide. It is inevitable when society reaches a level capable of sustaining trade with other cultures. The benefits of multiculturism for society are so strong that any attempt to keep a society homogenous inevitably fails, and how the conflicts are solved can tell you a lot about what sort of society it is.
As can the ease, or difficulty, an individual may have in renouncing/abandoning his ‘cultural heritage’.
Ozboy linked to the case currently obsessing the UK media, the Pakistani men convicted of grooming underage girls on the street.
One of the convicted men had refused to attend the trial after calling the judge a racist basterd and finding the jury were all white.
There is a general agreement that the case against these men was delayed because of ‘concerns’ that further investigation after the first allegation of rape by a 15y old might be construed as race motivated overzealous intrusion.
Only when a new local crown prosecutor was appointed and he re-examined the case in the light of continuing concerns by social services who were nominally responsible for the safety of some of the victims was action taken to arrest and try the group.
It is perhaps revealing that the official with no qualms about pursuing the case shared the ethnic background of the perpetrators.
For a while at least, any brown taxi driver accused of rape has a much reduced probability of acquittal in a jury trial.
Rather like the Irish in the 70s when bombs were going off… Juries ended up sending several mainly innocent groups to prison.
Of course the judges didn’t fare much better, they refused several appeals well after the initial blanket antagonism to all Irish had faded.
If the level of social bigotry is at the level where people start to think that it might make sense to ‘screen’ people for discriminatory attitudes before jury trial, then the social biases have distorted any judicial system to a point where the overt xenophobia of a juror is the least of a defendant’s problems.
@farmerbraun “Surely prospective jurors are innocent of the charge of being racist until proven guilty. Andrew Richards is simply demonstrating his own prejudice.”
And much like trials for criminals, there is this little thing called the jury selection process you might want to look at. The only thing I have actually advocated for here (besides society here taking a long hard look at itself in light of the concerns raised) is the notion of pre-selection psychological screening for racist beliefs in cases where judges feel that bigotry may be an issue. Such a move would not automatically bar people from serving on jury trials and would minimise the chances of a mistrial happening down the track. Surely such an extra process is actually in the best interests of the victims in this case?
“I forgot to mention that Andrew Richards also demonstrates his approval of double standards: that is essentially what he is arguing in favour of. Clearly the concept of one law for all is unacceptable to him : a misinformed sense of superiority perhaps. Andrew knows best!”
You talk about the concepts of law, however you clearly don’t understand the concepts of our legal system, considering that my entire argument has been based on what is the most crucial element of our legal system- the presumption of innocence.
“Such prejudice as does exist here (extremely minor, compared to elsewhere on earth, as I said above), is hardly confined to white prejudice against Muslims. If I were a Greek defendant, I’d be very nervous if there were any Macedonians or Turks on my jury. There’s the usual dollop of anti-semitism lurking somewhere beneath the surface. I have been told by Croats that in their language, the word for “Serbian” is regarded as a swear word. We have large communities of both, and when their ethnically-based soccer teams meet in our local league, it gets rather, um, “animated”. Wouldn’t want that other lot on my jury, eh? Indians and Pakistanis, Tamil and Sinhalese, Sunnis and Shia, on and on, it’s the same here as it is in any multi-cultural society.”
Which only goes to prove my point. In fact if you looked at what I posted, I said:
“However when there is such a potential for someone to be judged based on their ethnicity or religious beliefs rather than the evidence, then I’d argue that there is a shortfall in the legal system which needs addressing. This shortfall is nothing new and it has been something which has gone on for far too long in the legal systems of far too many countries.”
So I was never claiming that this problem was limited to JUST “white prejudice against Muslims” like you claim I was.
Secondly as izen states:
“The celtic/viking legal philosophy is communal. A jury of your peers represented a collective administration of justice by the society as a whole, or at least via their selected representatives. And the assumption was that those judging were equal members of the group. This all works best if the society is relatively homogeneous.”
Yet as you have stated, there is a far from homogenous situation out there and considering how easily mistrials can be declared, then common sense dictates that any kind of bigotry which could impact on a jury’s ability to objectively judge a case based on the evidence presented, is something which does need to be factored out of the equation.
“If Andrew isn’t against jury trials per se, to what lengths would he be prepared to investigate the backgrounds of each potential juror? He states above (on a Libertarian blog!) that he would like to see a psychological evaluation of every potential member of a jury pool. Where “race might be a factor”. As opposed to gender, physiognomy, sexual preference, political beliefs…”
Oz, here’s a thought, when you have a question over what I propose, try actually asking me than inferring something is far more totalitarian than what I was actually proposing. As the old saying goes, assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.
Since you do need me to clarify exactly what I was proposing though; as far as pre-screening goes, you would devise a range of tests for each scenario where you solely evaluate whatever bigotry you’re concerned about that would impact on the ability for a juror to examine the facts of the case. What I envisage would be a body of multiple tests where when the relevant trial came up, the relevant test would be given and jurors put forward for pre-screening from there. Results could be kept confidential or even destroyed after the pre-selection process to avoid the results being misused.
Could the process result in some people cheating it and resulting in a mistrial? Possibly, as no test or process is perfect 100% of the time. However it would offer a better solution than what we have now, which is no solution to the problem at all.
@Susanne “Wow, an immediate ad hominem attack from AR as soon as I post here ”
There was no “ad hominen attack” here as much as you might like to wish there was. I initially pointed out there reasons why such concerns over a jury trial were understandible, the the Zionist and imperialist propaganda behind such racial bigotry and the Zionist and Imperialist atrocities which were being covered up by said propaganda.
You responded with a sarcastic post which actually made the ludicrous claim that Zionism somehow protects Arab women (which is the height of irony btw) when you claim “It would not be fair for him to be tried by an awful, prejudiced Australian jury that might have disgusting (zionist plot) ideas such as gender equality and a woman’s right to freedom of movement!”
Through your sarcasm, you entirely trivialised the suffering of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of women during the period from the past century right through to this current day, as well as trivilaising the suffering of the First Nations women during the entire American Colonial Period (referring to Benny Morris’ apologetics of Plan D) – all while claiming to be making an argument under women’s rights.
Furthermore, such assumptions ignore the fact that, to take one example of that whole debate, some Muslim women, including highly educated Muslim women, actually WANT to be able to wear the burqa and hijab as opposed to it being entirely a case of it being forced upon them by Muslim men, which tends to be a common myth out there.
There was nothing “ad hominem” about it – your entire argument became one giant double standard and did your credibility absolutely no favours.
Secondly your entire post highlighted the problem I was raising. You have an Arab Muslim in a courtroom and the opening statement involves the phrase “Sharia Law”. Considering the ignorance and and bigotry here of the average Australian due to the aforementioned propaganda, including the issues surrounding people smugglers (where the desperate refugees are the ones who mainly get villainised); it’s a safe bet that most jurors would immediately be tainted by that opening statement and the actual evidence of the case would not be objectively examined.
The alleged crime is abhorrent and if the evidence matches the claims (and I am not saying it doesn’t) then certainly he deserves to be found guilty. However because of the fact that we are so against the wrongful imprisonment of an innocent man; that process has to exist for everyone – even in cases where the evidence is clear cut.
The problem is that when you stop worrying about that process and the presumption of “innocent until proven guilty”; where do you start making exceptions and where do you stop? How quickly does the process become open to abuse and persecution of whichever minority happens to be the “evil other” of the day? Oz worries about my idea being totalitarian, yet history tells us time and time again, that it is the when we start making exclusions and exceptions to that principle that totalitarianism and oppression ALWAYS follows.
Being a libertarian blog, I would have thought that such issues would be a concern for everyone here. It’s surprising that with the exception of one or 2 others here, the opposite appears to be the case.
If my quoting you directly, (and even hyperlinking to that quote) is “inferring something is far more totalitarian than what I was actually proposing”, then I’m afraid, Andrew, you’re shaking your fist at a mirror. You just don’t realize it yet – Oz
The UK trial has NOTHING to do with race (though the media is trying to portray it that way), and nor is this one. The UK one is about an ideology that allows men to use women whom ‘their right hand possesses’ – ie slaves. This trial is about the ideology that says it’s ok to beat disobedient women. Call me a bigot for disagreeing with this ideology if you like.
Libertarianism begins with the principle that every sentient person owns themselves. I’ve taken as this blog’s theme, that it follows from this basic premise that we must also accept responsibility for our own actions, and that any claiming of rights is contingent on that acceptance. Any ideology, be it religious, political or philosophical, that teaches that one person can own another is antithetical to Libertarianism – Oz
“If my quoting you directly, (and even hyperlinking to that quote) is “inferring something is far more totalitarian than what I was actually proposing”, then I’m afraid, Andrew, you’re shaking your fist at a mirror. You just don’t realize it yet – Oz”
On the contrary Oz, the person who cannot see the slippery slide into totalitarianism they’re on here is you. What I proposed, if you had actually bothered to read it, had more than enough checks and balances to prevent misuse of the information, while your insistence on ignoring both the problem only leads to a situation which in at the 20th Century, in numerous occasions, resulted in religious persecution of individuals through the legal system. Granted you could argue that that was a “top-down” instance of persection, but as the genocide of the indigenous people here in Australia proves, genocide that occurs in a manner that is “bottom-up” much like persecution, is equally damaging and abhorrent.
I’m not ignoring the problem. You’re imagining the problem. You wish to impose your minority views on the whole community, even though there are Christians, Muslims and Jews on all sides of politics who see no need for it. Just one judge, whose ruling was overturned in a higher court – Oz
“This trial is about the ideology that says it’s ok to beat disobedient women. Call me a bigot for disagreeing with this ideology if you like.”
No actually Susanne, it is about a man being charged with forcibly and illegally detaining and assaulting a female relative – those are what the allegations made are and which he had been charged over, just as that is what the evidence is concerned with. The very fact that again, you bring race and religion into it rather than making this about the evidence, not only reaffirms what I have been saying about the social prejudices at play here and their causes, but proves that the judge’s concerns over a jury trial were not without merit, that we do have a serious problem with racism and ignorance and that what I was suggesting about pre-screening juries for bigotry is indeed something which society needs to consider.
One last thing Oz, if my suggestion is supposedly totalitarian Oz, then I’d respond by asking how libertarian a lynch mob is? After all with the exception of the capital aspects of a lynch mob there, what you are essentially defending is a kangaroo court system (which is what you wind up with if a jury is too blinded by bigotry to judge a case based solely on the evidence) with no thought to the consequences of such a system, nor to the protections, both those currently present and those currently lacking in it. There is a difference between liberty and anarchy- in this instance it appears you are unable to recognise that distinction. After all, as the old saying goes “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”.
Our jury system, in your eyes, represents a lynch mob? Or a kangaroo court? In that case Andrew, your time would be better spent writing to the Law Reform Commission. I doubt they lurk here – Oz
AR, his request for special treatment is entirely about his ideology. And why on earth are you bringing race into it, when there are muslims of every race out there?
Just tell me this: would a juror be a bigot for disagreeing with the koranic ideas that men should control over women and even beat disobedient women?
So many questions addressed specifically to me here, I have to respond to them in-line – Oz
“I’m not ignoring the problem. You’re imagining the problem. You wish to impose your minority views on the whole community, even though there are Christians, Muslims and Jews on all sides of politics who see no need for it. Just one judge, whose ruling was overturned in a higher court – Oz”
Really? So Imagined the Cronulla Riots; did I?
You’re imagining that five thousand drunken yobbos seven years ago, in a city of a population of nearly five million, egged on by a foolish radio broadcaster and waving Australian flags, constitute a coherent reason to change our entire system of criminal justice. Yes, you’re imagining that.
How about the uproar in Camden over the Islamic School going in there with cries of “we’re a Christian country” at the heart of it? Uproar? A couple of dozen locals in a residents action group?? Come on.
I’ve imagined middle class family friends who have lived in the Western Suburbs of Sydney have negative attitudes; have I? Now you’re asking me whether or not you are imagining attitudes of people I have never met. Perhaps you should address your question to someone who knows you both. Or maybe a professional counsellor.
I’ve imagined xenophobic responses from multiple people when I helped an independent political party member campaigning in Toronto last election regarding more people coming intoo this country tied directly into the “stop the boats” rhetoric have I? Imagining xenophobia does seem to be something of a recurring theme with you, Andrew 🙄
I’ve imagined talkback hosts and their scores of mindless drone listeners mouthing off of late about in-community processing after identities have been confirmed while inferring that they’re all potential terrorists; have I? The reality is that I’m not the one burying my head in the sand on this one, you are. How about we let our readers be the jury on that question?
“Our jury system, in your eyes, represents a lynch mob? Or a kangaroo court? In that case Andrew, your time would be better spent writing to the Law Reform Commission. I doubt they lurk here – Oz”
Choosing to reply in an obtuse manner does not negate the problem. There is a vast difference between theory and practice. In theory the system is fair and impartial, however we do not live in the bubble of a textbook. The reality is that when a jury is tainted enough by bigotry; then it is that bigotry which is judged and not the evidence at hand. Then that happens, then yes, what you have in practice is little more than a legally sanctioned lynch mob. As such taking steps to negate that problem is and entirely reasonable point to suggest. No, I really mean it. Go and write to the LRC. Tell them your concerns. Organise a group of like-minded individuals and petition the government. Go and tell your local Member of Parliament that his/her constituents, owing to their widespread bigotry, cannot be trusted to be fit for jury service, particularly when the defendant is a Muslim, without prior psychological screening. And while you’ve got his attention, tell him that not only should he push this message to his electorate while campaigning for re-election, but that he himself should be subjected to psychiatric evaluation before ever again being allowed to pass laws that affect the rest of us across the country.
Get back to us and let us know how you got on – Oz
Susanne, I feel that I should warn you that AR uses this site to take his personal hobby-horses out for a canter from time to time, just in case you were thinking that you could elicit a rational and reasoned response. Past experience has shown that this is unlikely. AR seems to have a hearing problem.
Andrew suggested that a juror might be a racist on the basis of his ideology, skin colour or perhaps his general appearance. He then says ;
“And much like trials for criminals, there is this little thing called the jury selection process you might want to look at”.
What a load of BS. As if such attitudes might be determined in the space of a few minutes during jury selection.
Hey FB, if we really do need a psychological work-up for anyone who has to sit on a jury (as one of twelve) and determine the guilt or innocence of a single man according to the law, then we had damn well better have comprehensive psychiatric evaluations, results made available on government websites, of anyone standing for parliament, who desires to actually make those laws. Now those evaluations would make interesting reading! I’m starting with Peter Slipper’s.
And while we’re at it, let’s head-shrink anyone in line for promotion as judge of the bench, whose job is to interpret those laws. And anyone applying to join the police force, whose job is to enforce those laws. Jurors are just small beer; let’s address the problem at the source, eh? Oz
LOL, I’d already noticed ;), but thanks for the warning Farmerbraun. Still, maybe he’ll let us know whether people who don’t agree with koranic instructions on control over women are actually ‘bigots’.
“AR, his request for special treatment is entirely about his ideology. And why on earth are you bringing race into it, when there are muslims of every race out there?
Just tell me this: would a juror be a bigot for disagreeing with the koranic ideas that men should control over women and even beat disobedient women?”
And you have completely missed the point here. Are his alleged actions against Australian Law regardless of what the Qu’ran says? Absolutely! Does the nature of this case mean that he should be denied due process including ensuring that the presumption of innocence is maintained and that he is judged based on the evidence rather than a jury potentially being clouded by their own bigotries and judging him based on those instead? Absolutely not!
Yet that is the problem. There is so much ignorance and bigotry over Muslims in the western world (oh and for the record, I’m white Anglo-Saxon Christian) that the moment you mention a case involving alleged (and under our legal system as he has not been found guilty yet, that is all it is; an allegation which is being investigated and prosecuted) aspects of Sharia law and an Arab Muslim (which is what the average person out there tends to believe all Muslims are), then it’s entirely reasonable to be concerned that that is all members of the jury may take in and the actual evidence wont come into it.
Now if that evidence includes enough contradictory evidence for reasonable doubt to be established and the jury has disregarded it, then that’s grounds not only for appeal, but the individual incarcerated to claim compensation for false incarceration. It’s also a travesty according to the core tenants of our legal system.
That’s the issue here- a fair trial; not whether Sharia Law should override Australian Law.
While we’re on the topic of how fundamentalist Islam has treated women in the past; it might interest you to know that one of the biggest providers of tertiary education in Palestine for women as well as men, was Hamas until the IDF shut it down (and it has remained shut down to the present day) during the first Intifada in a totalitarian move. It just goes to show what happens when you actually look at the issues rather than treating Al Qaeda and the Taliban as the epitome of fundamentalist Islam instead of the nutjobs and rednecks they are respectively.
Furthermore let’s look at where in the Old Testament, women were to be stoned to death for adultery. But then it’s far easier in society to find an “other” than admit things are far more grey than we might like in terms of how strictly some groups adhere to certain belief tenants.
@FB “you were thinking that you could elicit a rational and reasoned response. Past experience has shown that this is unlikely. AR seems to have a hearing problem.”
Oh the irony, considering the last time we encountered each other, your posts were nothing but a sea of relativist fallacy and eugenic apologetics. I don’t have a hearing problem at all. However you have shown yourself time and time again to have a reasoning problem as your following post proves:
“Andrew suggested that a juror might be a racist on the basis of his ideology, skin colour or perhaps his general appearance.”
Really, I could have sworn I actually suggested individual psychological screening tests which where confidentiality was maintained, instead of racial profiling which is what you are arguing for here.
“He then says ;
“And much like trials for criminals, there is this little thing called the jury selection process you might want to look at”.
What a load of BS. As if such attitudes might be determined in the space of a few minutes during jury selection.”
And again, the point flies right over your head and into the stratosphere. The fact that we do have a jury selection process means that the system is concerned that jury members may be tainted. Adding another layer to the selection process, in the form of a pre-selection process independent from wither side, is entirely in line with that process. Furthermore, you actually argue my case for me by pointing out that the current selection process is inadequate for dealing wiht such bigotries.
Susanne welcome to LG our gracious host allows us the freedom to discuss things in an open manner and you will find that all of us while we may vary widely on a lot of issues will at the end of the day be adults and remember it’s just talk. However we had better be able to defend our positions.
“if we really do need a psychological work-up for anyone who has to sit on a jury (as one of twelve) and determine the guilt or innocence of a single man according to the law, then we had damn well better have comprehensive psychiatric evaluations, results made available on government websites, of anyone standing for parliament, who desires to actually make those laws. And while we’re at it, anyone in line for promotion as judge of the bench, whose job is to interpret those laws. And anyone applying to join the police force, whose job is to enforce those laws.”
To a point I would be in complete support of such a move as well, however I question the public display of psychological evaluations due to abuses with privacy concerns. That said, the system could work if things were handled by the Electoral Commission in the case of candidates and other relevant bodies in the case of police and the judiciary. Recent police scandals show that the police force in some, if not all states, could certainly benefit from it.
“Jurors are just small beer; let’s address the problem at the source, eh? Oz”
But they’re also “the point of the sword” in the final administration of justice, unless you get to the point where the jury is replaced with a panel of judges. In the old saying of “leave no stone uunturned” the operative term is “no stone”.
Izen…”Ozboy linked to the case currently obsessing the UK media, the Pakistani men convicted of grooming underage girls on the street.
One of the convicted men had refused to attend the trial after calling the judge a racist basterd and finding the jury were all white.
There is a general agreement that the case against these men was delayed because of ‘concerns’ that further investigation after the first allegation of rape by a 15y old might be construed as race motivated overzealous intrusion.”
So lets get this straight child abuse and child prostitution are trumped by potential racism so it was okay for these bastards to destroy these kids lives?
The left never ceases to amaze me in defending the indefensible this case is one of a lot more it’s an endemic problem with the Pakistani community and their justifications are racial and religious. They are lucky they were tried in the UK because in places like Africa they would never have reached the courts before the mob burnt them alive or the police took them down to some lonely spot and got rid of them, ask any of the old Africa hands the stories they can tell will send a shiver down your left wing spine.
If the Pakistani community feels that the UK is a racist country then I suggest they can always eff back to Pakistan and be free to experience justice ala Pakistan. The fact they don’t speaks volumes about what they think of both countries.
“The left never ceases to amaze me in defending the indefensible this case is one of a lot more it’s an endemic problem with the Pakistani community and their justifications are racial and religious.”
The problem there is that the whole Pakistani issue is again, linked to concerns over Islamophobia thanks to what started out as the war for opium and on liberty and involved to also be the war for oil as well.
I agree that it’s outrageous that we should be scared to protect children from abhorrent crimes like rape; however it’s also pretty tragic to say the least that we’re at the point where people feel such concerns are there to the point where they’re either legitimate and result in a travesty of justice, or merely being exploited and result in a travesty of justice. To the point where the prosecution needs to be so racially airtight that a mistrial cannot be claimed.
This is why I argue that as this is clearly now an issue, the only solution is to reform the jury selection process so such bigotries can be neutralised before they get to the point of selection where lawyers on either side could manipulate the process.
Also Oz, for some reason, a comment I made at 2.20pm is still awaiting moderation for some reason. That’s because playing with my children is more important than responding to you – Oz
Some people like cup-cakes better : I , for one , prefer them less.
Bigotry, obviously.
Andrew Richards following your logic the entire legal system would collapse overnight due to innate bigotry or racism and no one could ever be convicted again.
I’m all for that because there are lots of people who are on my shit list and I want revenge and the fact that no could send me to jail would be awesome. Maybe I can go for the serial killing record while I’m at it?
What is the fascination with race? Why assume whitey is evil? Because bad news a lot people of many shades are racist on this planet, go live in China they are amazing xenophobes and see how there justice system works.
“If the level of social bigotry is at the level where people start to think that it might make sense to ‘screen’ people for discriminatory attitudes before jury trial, then the social biases have distorted any judicial system to a point where the overt xenophobia of a juror is the least of a defendant’s problems.”
A jury is not a ‘lynch mob’. The nation of Britain has one law for all, and nobody is above that law. Different nations have different laws and cultures. I would not choose to live in a nation who’s laws did not sit well with my culture.
@Kitler & fenbeagleblog.
You claim that if racism and bigory were taken into account, that the entire legal system would fall apart and that the jury system is not a lynch mob.
Clearly both of you have forgotten about the most notorious legal proceedings in history – the Salem Witch Trials. That entire blight on the history of the Western World showed not only how quickly bigotry can pervert the course of justice, but how not just juries, but the entire judiciary, can turn into just that – a lynch mob.
It is a stark and telling reminder to everyone about the dangers of bigotry affecting trials.
Now it’s tempting to claim we’re more evolved and more civilised than that as a society, yet history tells us otherwise. We claimed “never again” after Nuremberg and yet the disabled were still being forcibly sterilised in the US until the 1970s, and in Australia, despite the apology, we still have the intervention going on and still to my knowledge have Madatory detention in NT (and if we don’t it’s something which has only hcanged in the past couple of years).
Juries are made up of human beings, meaning they are going to be flawed, imperfect, and generally speaking, in one way or another, prejudiced. A jury selection process will not weed out bigotry, either due to time or limits to challenges, and depending on the area, it can result in an entirelly tainted jury pool, depending on the case in question.
Our system exists on the premise of “innocent until proven guilty” because we believe that “it is better for 100 guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be imprisoned”. That is whi we have appeals, that is why we abolished captial punishemt here and that is why we have mistrials and jury selection processes.
If we have a situation where even the judiciary are starting to fear the danger of mistrials due to racial bigotry, then the system already is falling apart. The only solution is to find an effective way of weeding out bigorty before a trial can be affected by it.
I’m not making any claims at all Andrew. Just defending what we have already. Anyone that’s not happy is free to ‘take a hike.’
andrew….Salem witch trials? Now I know you are trolling.
@- Andrew
Even if you had identified a unique moral hazard from a specific shared bigotry you proposed solution of screening is rooted in a very shallow conception of human identity.
The idea that people could be screened for any relevent bigotry, bias or discriminatory attitudes before jury service, or another role encompasses a number of implicit assumptions that are beyond facile.
Who and how would you judge between bias and justifiable suspiscion? Your suggestion appears to assume that some independent neutral arbiter could divide any detected attitudes with absolute confidence into such distinct categories.
Perhaps you have used the screening tests to select the infallible arbiter….{grin}
The idea that you can test people and determine any accurate information about their attitudinal behvior in a novel, unknown future situation is deep fantasy. Perhaps you have been misled by reports from psychology research that they could detect racist bias, or determine social attitudes from experiments they had carried out. That may work {at least to a statistically significant degree} in controlled conditions with cooperative volunteers. Its not going to work on people who may resist giving meaningful answers, or be intentionally duplicitous. You have about as much chance of telling anything from screening tests as hooking each candidate up to a lie detector and asking if they will act honestly and rationally in the future!
Mistrials and injustice are an inevitable result of inherent, and reactive social bigotries. Raising the danger to one groups as exceptional is either unconscious partiality or a mistaken view of the relative importance of that characteristic in the source or formation of discriminatory attitudes. All it takes is difference to generate bigotry.
Consider the most basic, and persistent source of individual injustice that pervades the legal system, not just in the actions of juries, but in how investigations and cases are framed and presented. Around half of the human race has often been denied the foundational principle of Libertarianism, and most other rational ethical systems – the ownership of themselves. The rights, and responsibilities of self- autonomy and sentient intentionality. Look up which crimes have the lowest conviction rates.
What you identify as a particular and specific problem of islamophobia which might be ‘solved’ by the fantasy device of a ‘real opinion detector’ is a much deeper and more complex problem of how societies manage diversity and gender identity. The biases and prejudices that all individuals hold can only be managed. A legal system that is moderately neutral and reasonably uncorrupt is about the best you can get. But it will always bend to the topical winds of opinion.
Better than tampering with jury selection, put in an automatic review and appeal procedure five/ten years later for any case in which either the defendant or plaintiff flags up a concern with discriminatory issues. It wont solve the unsolvable problems of topical bias, but it may speed up the correction of such errors as it would have in the case of the Guilford four or birmingham six. Classic cases of legal miscarriage which were down to a lot more than jury bias.
Izen about the only psychological illness that can be tested for is sociopathic/psychopathic behaviour but like all tests it is not 100%, however you can do brain scans to confirm missing gray matter in the frontal lobes. Oddly enough such people tend to gravitate towards jobs as judges which makes andrews argument somewhat invalid, as he is swapping 10 people for one possible loony.
Izen, what is your problem? 🙂
Clearly Andrew will decide. Who else has the ability?
@- farmerbraun says:
“Clearly Andrew will decide. Who else has the ability?”
Has he passed the screening test?
… Oh, he sets the questions!
Folks, the person in question will return later this afternoon, after I get the chance to moderate a particularly long post. He will then be welcome to participate in a constructive manner in the discussion at Ozboy’s Bar and Grill.
AR, everyone knows that Jesus changed the stoning rule, – if you don’t know that I can’t believe that you are a christian (and I’m an atheist btw). And rabbinical law removed stoning from Jewish practice centuries ago.
But who has updated 4:34 of the koran?
Several things I want to comment on, but unfortunately not much time to do it. I’ll have to admit to skipping most of AR’s skid marks.
Suzanne (greetings!) has covered a lot of what I intended to say about the trial and conviction of those followers of the bloke who married a six year old girl and began raping her when she was nine – and he was in his mid fifties.
I listened to the BBC (radio 4 10pm current affairs program ) coverage of the convictions. There was much questioning about
“is this a racial matter?”
To which each interviewee could honestly answer “No”
The implication being that our multi culti society is innocent,
It also attempts to avoid the more pertinent question: “is this anything to do with attitudes held by the followers of a certain religion of peace?” – in which the book, and more importantly the hadith (plural) and the sunna (that which is unchangeable and to suggest change is to commit blasphemy, for which accusation there is no defence, and the punishment is death…) all set out the opinion that non muslim females are there to be used, abused and enslaved without censure.
The followers of that religion (who’s societies all degenerate from their previous creative heights, into a squalid backwardness – as must all highly prescriptive collectivisms) have some serious problems with ideas of individual responsibility and interpersonal boundaries.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to trade with them, but if I had children, I would not want them being kicked around and culturally enriched up their rear ends by children who’ve been influenced by that book.
Who said
“There is one law for all of us”?
Unfortunately not. Those in the admin-sphere operate from behind (or above – choose your own metaphor) the law which the rest of us are under.
There are many, many instances where those individuals in the administration get away with legally carrying out actions for which the rest of us, acting as our own individual, would be liable to face criminal prosecution.
Let’s not fool ourselves that those individuals act for us and by us, they don’t.
The continuation of jury service, and the myth of democracy, go part way to (paraphrase both US Pres Hamilton, and John Maynard Keynes, two of my least favourite historical figures)convince us that we the people are inflicting those laws on ourselves, for ourselves.
“Serving” (notice the word, it implies a duty – not something we would choose to do without coercion) on a jury, you are being forced to labour for free – the only other one in the building who is forced to be there without reward, is the accused. In other words, you are doing slave labour.
You are not, as Kitler implied, partaking in the communal self government which the Norse did. You are lending a veneer of legitimacy to our ruler’s laws – at your own expense.
We are a long way from a contractual system of justice – one which cannot be coerced upon us.
Such systems effectively applied in many of the city states in Europe, up until Bismark militarily crushed them.
Independent cities, cantons and manors, competed to attract the best artisans, artists, merchants etc etc. They therefore made a point of adopting as favourable, as unintrusive and as simple and understandable (written!) legal codes as possible, and they advertised which legal code they used – say: Magdeburg law.
As someone has already commented “If you’re not happy with the law of the land, get out!” In a Germany, a Swiss Federation, or an Italy of several hundred city states, cantons, independent manors; that was a realistic possibility, and the move might only be 10 or 20 miles.
I’m no fan of sharia, or of socialism; national or international, but!
Would it be inconsistent with libertarianism, for those who choose to live under such idiocies, to be able to do so on their own property?
I know that there are some big problems, like a nine year old girl ending up in an arranged “marriage” from which there is no realistic prospect of her being able to seek protection
at the risk of falling into the smelly mess of one of AR’s tu quoque fallacies (AR, That’s an insult – not an ad hominem!), would that be any worse than the present disgraceful “care” given to children who have been confiscated from their parent by individual bureaucrats acting in the name of “the state”?
A much easier question is what happens to those who subscribe to different and conflicting legal codes and who come into conflict?
If we are able to buy our legal protection services, in the same manner as we buy any other good or service on a free market (Rothbard discusses this in chapter 1 of “power and Markets” – the bit of “man, economy and state” that the original publisher chopped out and wouldn’t publish! – Hans Herman Hoppe has also developed the ideas further), then we could either look for an acceptable third judge (and or jury) or arbitrator.
(the medieval trading fairs, for example Champagne – were a place to seek independent arbitrators known for their abilities in conflict resolution – until the French Monarchy violently destroyed the fairs and much of the trade in Europe – the resulting economic collapse and poverty may well have helped the 14th century plagues allong).
Or, if the two courts could not reach agreement, they could seek a third court – acceptable to both.
If the courts are selling their services competitively, then they have an incentive to serve their customers, by their integrity and by settling disputes with minimal cost and with restitution to the aggrieved party
Things which the statist legal monopoly has no interest at all in doing.
In Britain, the judges have been complaining about the quality of juries available to them. The Labour government made 13 thousand new criminal offences for business misdeeds alone.
That means that anyone who has first hand experience of business is likely to have at least one criminal conviction.
The result is, that in complex trials, in which someone with an average English IQ of 100 is half a standard deviation too dumb to grasp the concepts at all and one whole standard deviation too dumb to grasp them in a timely manner. That section of the smart fraction who had a business are excluded, leaving only some smart statists to form the jury.
That is especially so for a long trial – in which anyone with a business or employed by anyone but the state sector – cannot possibly serve.
Don’t worry, in a jury trial, you are placing yourself in the hands of 12 of your fellow citizens who were too dumb to get out of jury service.
;^)
The issue of a biased jury has arisen many times in the U.S. That, as far as I know, has meant the jury pool was composed of individuals with a special interest in the case, or a jury pool of individuals who had been exposed to so much publicity about the case, they would not be able to disregard what they heard in the media and decide only upon the evidence presented in court.
The remedy to the first problem is to move the trial to a different place where you can find a jury pool of individuals who have no special or personal interest in the case. The remedy to media coverage problem is usually to move the case to another location far enough away where the media coverage might not have been extensive. In the biggest cases, where media coverage has been national, the judge questions potential jurors to find ones he is satisfied can disregard what the media said, and reach a verdict on the basis only of what is presented in court.
But never, to my knowledge, has it been said that there is no jury capable of being non-biased. By doing so, this judge has set the precedent for multi-culturalism to overrule not only the trial-by-jury principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence , but even more important, for multi-culturalism to over-rule the laws of the land. The basis of the bias is that the jurors come from one society which has customs and rules of law different from those of the defendant. By saying imparital jurors cannot be found, the judge has in effect also disqualified himself. He is every bit as much influenced by the mores and laws of his society as the jurors are. If jurors can’t be found who are not biased, than neither can a judge and the judge should not have been able to serve in the case. To do so was judicial error. That judge by calling bias what he knew would be the jurors’ disgust at the particular crime has also in effect said Australia cannot prosecute the crime. (A Muslim man beat up his sister-in-law for taking his wife to the beach, where some of her skin might show.) The bias wasn’t the kind I gave examples of in the U.S. that can be fixed, but the bias of every Australian except Muslims at this particular behavior. So to have an unbiased case, you could only have Muslim jurors, prosecutors and judge – who would not find this behavior a crime.
The DT recently had the story of the Congolese immigrants in Britain who believed children were sometimes witches and when they are, they must be tortured slowly to death. So a Congolese couple resident in Britain tortured to death over a period of days their neice whom they had decided was a witch. Any British jury, probably including Muslims, and any British judge would be digusted at this crime. Under the Australian’s judge’s thinking, that disgust is bias and excludes everyone in Britain from adjudicating the case, except other Congolese who believe in the same practice. So in effect, the Australian judge has set the precedent for practices of other cultures, no matter how heinous, never being crimes in the host country.
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Caroline851
Hello, when you get here. I assume you are British, but I am not sure. When were you in France?
Looking at the comments again;
There appears to be an assumption implicit in some of them, that institutions exist which are somehow less fallible than the individuals which they are comprised of.
deus ex machina (god out of the machine – or out of the car, if you use modern Italian)
All human actions are imperfect, part of libertarianism is non aggressively, making our own imperfect way, rather than putting up with someone else’s imperfect actions being violently forced upon us.
@Luton Ian,
Just one side note, I think that Deus Ex Machina is Greek (I did not look it up again, so perhaps I am mistaken)…but the etymology is from the old Greek plays if I remember correctly where a God would come out of the machine so to speak and solve the dilemna in the play through “divine intervention.” – perhaps latin ? – and the term goes back to Greek roots and such? I am not a scholar of latin or Greek by any means and language hardly lol. History and etymology is just one of my hobbies so to speak.
That being said, your reply overall is probably the best reply here. People expect the script and problems of everything to be solved by a God (so to speak). The device if I remember correctly is even frowned upon by writers in fiction today because it is so contrived and invented. In a real plot, you want the plot to solve itself in other words with the characters working it out or circumastances coming together without some “divine influence” being necessary to set things straight.
But in reality, people look for this. They will vote for the person who promises to solve the most problems with the least heartache whether its possible or not.
And in the case of these jury trials, same thing. People assume that these institutions that are made up of people are somehow God-like and in-fallible.
One example is one of my relatives who has a spouse who has health troubles. This relative just goes on about how they can not wait for ObamaCare to take effect and make it so they always have insurance coverage. And you just have to smack your forehead and cry for them because Obamacare is not some infallible God that will solve healthcare automatically or make everything perfect with the world. If you promise the people breads and circuses and distract them, this works wonders.
We can sit and wonder how such people get elected, but the truth is that they are experts at human psychology and they really get people and how to manipulate them. People don’t want the hard truth all the time, frankly they would prefer the Old Roman method of bread, circus’s and lots of bloodshed in the gladiator pits. It solves one of their problems for a time (hunger), takes them away from life’s hardships for just a second, and above all else gives them something fun.
This is what modern liberalism is, from this case where we advocate that a judge can try a person better then a jury with no evidence thereof of any bias or anything. Because the God in the machine exists, these institutions are perfect and the people buy it because they are frankly gullible and easilly distracted as long as you can take their minds off of their real problems just for a bit.
Cause a race riot in the US or legalize gay marriage? Sure, great idea to distract the people from a terrible economy.
But you might ask the very pertinent question, what does this have to do with this example of people being tried under a judge versus a jury? Well the people are once again being distracted from real problems with a solution that is just like in Roman and Greek days something out of a play back then. Its a solution that is perfect divine intervention that will work because the Government says so. They offer the circus (the trial), the bread (the conviction or lack thereof depending on which group they want to placate), and the blood…well that was already offered up in either the original crime which the people will get to relive in the trial, or even more blood in the punishment.
Its perfect for this type of distraction from a liberal Government that wants to show-case how caring and politically correct it is while at the same time being some sort of God that is never wrong and never will be. In other words, just another day at the Government office.
I don’t think the actual religion of those effected matters at all, or the race or the reasons for putting this on trial, because you can substitute any kind of minority religion, race or even sexual orientation and get the same result out of society nowadays. Just follow the circus and watch what the circus is really there to distract people from. Most of the time with the world economy in the toilet, I think its pretty obvious…..
Dueling, evolved from trial by combat. Trial by combat was a cynical attempt to have god intervene, and become the judge. Either way it makes a cheap ‘circus’ of it, and saves all the complications.
…(But doesn’t have anything to do with fairness or justice.)
Luton Ian you bloody peasant you should know better than to question your Norman betters, bah no wonder they can’t find anyone fit for a jury these days. Time for a harrying of the north again methinks…..
Well some interesting points you raised on Medieval legal codes but they didn’t apply to general labour just skilled labour. Peasants had no money so very few rights.
Another legal code that might bear looking at again is the weregild system of the Germanic tribes so if you killed another person (men only, women and children have no value) then depending on their rank in society you paid a sliding scale indemnity for that and no jail.
ozboy
I told a couple of DT bloggers with whom I wanted to pursue a conversation about this blog and how if we were courteous enough to first let the comments be made on the current article, it was a wonderful place to do a few posts to finish off a conversation we had started on a DT blog, and if we were lucky, maybe we might even get a few contibutions from the posters already here. I hope that is OK, because it would be off-topic. If it isn’t, let me know, and we’ll take our off topic convesation elsewhere.
BUT WOW, I wish I had known what was on this thread when I told others about the interesting posts on this blog. How certain individuals can turn anything into a place for anti-semtic rants is beyond me.
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Caherine851
If you show up here, the tenors of these texts are not what is normal here. The unpleasant tone is not normal here. Had I known the thread was like this, I would have never suggested coming here.
msher it should be pointed out that the judge in the article above allowed his own racial/religious/political biases to interfere in his duties as a judge he became it is obvious enamored of identity politics of the left. So as he judged himself a victim of a persecuted minority he projected that on the man in this case and ignored the blatant reality that the man is just an ill educated moron and a thug.
So the judge opened up the can of worms of his identity to criticism. I feel that no group is above being discussed not even my own. Do I hate the judge for being Jewish no, do I hate him for being a lefty yes I do. However he can’t escape censure by us as he is trying to have his cake and eat it so to speak hiding behind his own victimhood.
At 3:02 PM on 11 May, msher had written:
Me, too, Bubbeleh. I grew up (and still live) in a corner of the state where there’s been a population of Orthodox Jews since late in the 19th Century. They’d bought up land here and established farms in close enough proximity to one another to form their own communities, each with a dinky little clapboard synagogue within convenient walking distance of enough homes to ensure a minyan and be sustained by the families attending. They were our neighbors, neither more nor less peculiar than any other kind, and a helluva lot less importunate than the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
Plenty of intermarriage happened (forget about Abie’s Irish Rose; it was nothing but Italian shiksas catching the eyes of those nice Jewish boys) as well as business partnerships and other commercial dealings, and if you’re in farm country when the Spring comes, you’ll hire anybody’s kids if they’re willing to get out there and pick rocks, Chosen People or goyim.
Many a kept-Kashrut-at-home Orthodox kid got his first unwitting taste of treyf by sharing a sandwich made by a loving Sicilian momma out of Sunday’s leftover sausage in red sauce for her hulking adolescent Vito.
I found it risible in the extreme when I discovered in medical school that the two ethnic groups in these United States who had the highest incidences of cholelithiasis and therefore the highest rates of cholecystectomy were Jews and Italians.
Well, why the hell not?
Antisemitism among us Wops? What for?
(Note: For more academic and general discussion of the attitudes demonstrated by Italians emigrating to America from the southern provinces – il Mezzogiorno – in their encounters with most other groups, I heartily recommend economist Thomas Sowell’s eminently readable Ethnic America: a History [1981], in reading which I was reminded of that scene in Blazing Saddles where Olson Johnson objects: “But we don’t want the Irish!”)
I also would not be speaking to Luton Ian if I was biased as he bears an uncanny resemblance to Tim Geitner.
Re all the comments about the consequences of eliminating juries, the EU plans to do exactly that. Juries do not figure largely in the civil law (i.e., European) system of jurisprudence, and as part of unifying the former nation-states of Europe, the different system of common law (i.e., British) jurisprudence must be eliminated. If you believe in a united Europe, this is very logical. It makes sense to have only be one system of justice which is used everywhere. I have read that civil law jurisprudence is being quietly snuck into Britain and there are already cases that have been tried under that system of jurisprudence.
But talking about the effect of eliminating the jury doesn’t go far enough with respect to the case talked about in this blog’s article. The kind of bias the judge was concerned about was not the kind where jurors would tend to believe or disbelieve a witness on the basis of their race. All the participants in the case are Muslim. So the jurors would not be discrimating among the witnesses. The only kind of bias the judge could be thinking of was the bias against the practices of another culture. There is no way a judge can show that if all potential jurors have that bias, he is somehow immune and in a criminal case, that the prosecutor is somehow also immune. So, as I said, in my first post, if this kind of bias is basis for eliminating a jury, it is also a reason why judges have to recluse themselves and processutors can’t prosecute. So now we have no judges and no jurors, and in criminal cases, no prosecutors – except individuals of the same culture as the litigants or defendants. So taken to its logical extreme, the judge’s ruling in effect means immigrants are not subject to the laws of their new country.
Tucci you are playing the victim card by using the term “wops”, you implicitly imply you are inferior to me by doing so. It shows an inferiority complex lurking in the background.
I know you are not, so stop doing it, it’s what the left does all the time to divide us, What is ironic I as an Englishman am automatically assumed to be an American yet you are what a hyphenated American? I am more American than you can ever be is that right?
Just to assure of my innate superiority….
Kitler
I hadn’t seen your last post to me when I posted my last post.
I agree with you about lefty judges. And yes there are many Jewish judges who are activists. Jews go into the professions in disproportionate numbers (because education and professions are highly emphasized in Jewish culture), so whatever you want to say about judges is going to include a disportionate number of Jews. I think some of the liberals, including Jews, are literally trying to make a mockery of the judical system in order to tear it down so it can be replaced by a different one. Other liberals, including Jews, simply are doing what they think needs to be done to make the present system fairer.(Blacks are convicted at a much higher rate than whites, for example.) In this case the judge was bending over backwards to be fair to the defendants, but he didn’t realize the logical conclusion of his action.
All the common law (jury) countries are going to have to deal with this issue, though. I mentioned the case in Britain about the Congolese couple who followed the Congolese custom of torturing to death a young boy they thought was a witch. In the Congo, apparently not only is this not a crime, but it is considered a good deed to protect the community. Of course the entire jury pool (i.e., all the individuals eligible in the jurisdiction to serve as jurors) are going to be appalled – as will be the judge. The judge will not be able to claim that he isn’t appalled. So he like the jurors can’t serve. To avoid bias, under this judge’s reasoning, only Congolese who follow this practice can serve in any capacity in the trial. So either there won’t be a trial or the Congolese will be found not guilty.
The Congolese case is an unusual one. But honor killings are now coming up a lot. In sharia countries, such killings may not even be a crime. Of course this judge in his misguided attempt to have a fair trial, made the wrong ruling. But the issue is going to keep coming up. What will have to happen is instructions have to be worked out for judges to give juries – I gave the example in my first post of jurors exposed to media accounts of a crime. The instructions to those juries are for them to disregard everything except what is actually presented in the courtroom. So, similarly, instructions will have to be worked out for this immigrant traditions type of cases. But what exactly should those instructions be? The Congolese did not commit a crime in their homeland or in their minds. They might not have even known that it is illegal to torture “witches” to death in Britain. The instructions to the jury are going to have to be that whatever the beliefs of the defendants and customs in the homeland of the defendant, the law of the host country as explained by the judge is going to apply.
At 4:07 PM on 11 May, Kitler hilariously mistakes me for
…and then segues into a vid of “Jerusalem.”
Well, on that last, I guess I’ll just have to reply:
The term “Wop,” by the way, derives from the Sicilian dialect term “guappo,” meaning someone who’s “handsome” or “dandy,” eventually coming to carry with it the connotation of “buddy” or “pal” among us Guineas.
The story I got was that Italian mommas in urban neighborhoods – the “Little Italy” parts of town – would summon their young male offspring with cries of “Guappone!” when it was time for supper, and those speaking the Sicilian dialect would commonly aspirate any hard “G” at the beginning of a word, leaving it sounding like “‘Uappone!” and thenceforth perceived by gli Amerigan’ as “Wop.”
Were you familiar with Sowell’s Ethnic America (previously mentioned), you’d be aware of the fact that the first few generations of Italian immigrants arriving in America were preyed upon most viciously by fellow Italian immigrants, just as had been the case in il Mezzogiorno, where you spoke the same dialect, attended the same church, confessed to the same priest, as the wealthy landowners who treated you as peasants fit only to live and to serve at their pleasure. There’s much that’s wrong with Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900 (1976), but in its portrayal of the – to Anglophones uncanny – intimacy of the hatefully abusive relationships between the “haves” and the “have nots” in Italy before our grandparents and great-grandparents got the hell out of there, it’s pretty educational.
Like the “N-word” among le mulignane, those of us with the pertinent cultural background – and last names ending in vowels – can and do employ the word “Wop” without giving the faintest goddam. Those in my own generation and generations subsequent have come to consider any alien who uses the word as a pejorative to be so friggin’ clueless as to be beneath contempt, and therefore a fit subject for ridicule rather than resentment.
If nothing else, it comes down to thoughts on our part about heavy objects and tidal estuaries, or how easy it is to dig nice, deep holes in the sugar sand of the Pine Barrens.
Woulda taken ’em years to find Emilio Carranza down by Chatsworth if he hadn’t augered in with most of his airplane still wrapped around him.
I’m not any part Italian (that I know of); but I have Italian relatives by marriage. I’m also about 1/32 Jewish. Or 1/64, I can’t remember. Plus Irish, English, Scottish, etcetera. I never think of myself in racial terms, but I do identify closely with my nationality. Without wishing to pre-empt my longer article on religion, I don’t think any of the major monotheistic religions identify uniquely as our national religion. Our laws are inherited from English Common Law, which in turn was a product of both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Enlightenment. Yet the centre of our continent was first opened in the nineteenth century up by Afghan camel drivers, who were of course Muslim.
That’s why, in a real sense, the case I referred to at the top of the thread may turn out to be a bit of a storm in a teacup. At least, I hope so. The raw facts of the case are not in dispute. The accused committed common assault. He broke the law of the land. He has now pleaded guilty. There is, so far as I am aware, no indication that his lawyers are seeking to absolve him of this crime on the basis that his actions did not also contravene his personal religious code. That, if anything, is a matter for the judge to weigh while considering sentence, not for a jury to consider while determining fact.
msher good points as usual, African culture is heavily influenced by it’s religious animist beliefs and also a callous disregard for life which is not surprising from a continent where life can be brutish and short thanks to disease, famine and warfare. When you understand that you know where they are coming from.
What we are really talking about is activist judges who use the system to implement a political goal or right an imaginary wrong or pluck from thin air a constitutional right that the founding fathers never intended.
The Australian judge is an activist judge that much is clear and stepped way beyond his remit he should be forced to step down as a judge as he is clearly not fit to serve on the bench anymore.
I think people in the West are tiring of PC multiculturalism and that combined with a bad economy in places like Europe is creating the ideal conditions for National Socialism to raise it’s ugly head again. Nigel Farage just gave a speech in the EU parliament warning against this.
ozboy
This particular case may turn out to be a tempest in a teapot, but as more and more practices which are crimes under Western law but not under the immigrant’s home’s law come up, the issue is going to become bigger and bigger. Prosecutors have been dealing with “honor killings” by avoiding empathsizing motive (There is no requirement to prove motive in a criminal case. The prosecutor usually wants to because it helps the jury believe the defendant did the crime, but you don’t have to prove it.) But defense lawyers are starting to raise the immigrant’s cultural or religious beliefs as a defense. So this question of jury bias against what they see as heinous acts is going to have to be dealt with, especially in honor killings. I bet anything that Congo beliefs and custom will be raised as a defense in the case of the Congolese who tortured the young “witch” to death.
Kitler
That’s what you are talking about. I am talking about how you deal with the fact that juries are all going to be biased against these heinous acts from other cultures.
So Tucci what you are telling me that most if not all Southern Italians are members of the criminal underclass? You obviously have not visited the high moors of England which gets somewhat hummocky near roads.
msher as everyone on planet Earth is biased to some extent or other and none of us perfect it is impossible anywhere to find the perfect juror let alone jury. You hope that among what 12 people they can come to a sane decision and over ride the odd loony. I think most juries actually do but they can only do so if the evidence is correct. Most wrongly convicted people are let go because of bad police procedure or evidence tampering or misidentification or the court not following it’s own rules. Rarely is it down to a jury per se, maybe an idiot jury member not following the court rules.
Demonstrating a terminal case of obtuse non sequitur, at 5:34 PM on 11 May, Kitler maunders:
Nah, we’re just plain, pragmatic people whose idea of a “family activity” is going down to the river to make sure the bubbles have stopped coming up.
As for what gets into the bogs in the realm of Perfidious Albion, that’s your peculiar look-out. Just remember the fact that peat-water has extremely inconvenient preservative properties.
Better to get the unwanted item well below the prevailing frost line on land or scrupulously ballasted if placing the material at the disposition of the marine ecology.
Neatness in all endeavors.
Tucci…Well the thing is no one goes up on the high moors apart from the occasional sheep lover and once you have gotten rid of the clothes whose to say it wasn’t a bronze age ritual sacrifice especially after the digger has mangled the evidence, allegedly.
Kitler and Tucci, it all seems a bit risky to me. The way to deal with these situations is called kai tangata in these parts.
At 6:46 PM on 11 May, farmerbraun writes:
Awfully high cholesterol proposition, that. You ever actually parted out a cadaver? Greasy!
Still and all, with a decent barbecue pit, some patience, and lots of Gates Bar-B-Q Sauce (Extra Hot, for preference), there’s a Kansas City solution in the offing.
Ever seen a movie titled Fried Green Tomatoes (1991)? I’ve heard Texans boast that they’ll barbecue anything, but I suspect that the folks in Alabama might go ’em the extra mile.
Maybe two.
Though I’m sure he meant it with some irony, I’ve been reading up with interest Tucci’s reference to the Fully Informed Juror’s Association In particular, FIJA’s policy of jury nullification; that is, a jury disregarding the instructions of a judge with regards to a law the jurors find objectionable. It’s prompted me to close off this thread by telling you a story I had originally decided not to, which will hopefully explain my own position on this issue.
A little over twenty years ago, I received a jury summons to serve on a trial in the Sydney District Court. The defendant was a young man, an immigrant from South Asia. He had an arabic surname, and from the presence of women in the gallery wearing the burqua, whom I assumed to be his relatives, I made the inference that he was a Muslim (though we were never actually told whether or not this was the case). He wasn’t being charged with beating his wife or having sex with a nine-year-old; in fact, he was charged with an offence which is denounced as vehemently by the Koran as it is by the Bible. If convicted, he was potentially looking at spending a sizable portion of his adult life behind bars.
To make his situation worse, as the trial wore on, we jurors could not help noticing that this young man was being led into the courtroom each morning in manacles; we also noticed a prison van driving away from the court each afternoon after the trial session had ended. The Court Sheriff saw that we had observed this, which prompted the judge to come clean with us that this individual was currently in prison, either on remand having been refused bail, or serving a sentence for another crime. He admonished us at length to disregard this fact (the full circumstances of which we learned after the trial), and told us on several occasions that his current incarceration had no bearing on his guilt or innocence in this case.
He was guilty as hell, too. Only, due to some rather incredible bungling by the investigating police officers, the key pieces of evidence against the defendant had become “tainted”. We were lectured at length about the “chain of evidence” standard required by a criminal court, and in fact the chief investigating officer was kept on the stand by both prosecuting and defence counsel for well over a week.
All up, the trial took almost two months to complete. I was taken away from my job, lost a great deal of money (jurors’ remuneration being a pittance) and seriously impacted my relatively new career. Much of this two months was spent by us jurors holed up in the jury room, presumably while counsel debated the admissibility or otherwise of various pieces of evidence. At the end of it, there was a veritable avalanche of information to consider. The judge’s summation and charge to the jury took almost half a day. But worse was to come – for me, at any rate.
During the charge to the jury, I became firmly convinced that, even though I was almost certain the defendant was guilty, according to the formulation given to us by the judge, the inadvertant tainting of evidence by the police detectives amounted to reasonable doubt as the judge defined it. This definition had been brought up several times over the course of the trial and, in the endless hours over those two months spent in the jury room, I found one other juror who agreed with me. And yet, even though there were some obvious bigots on the jury (one or two shockers, actually), at no point did any of them suggest that we should convict this young man because of what we all assumed was his religion. They wanted him behind bars, because they were convinced on the basis of the evidence they had seen, and the testimony they had heard, that he had committed the crime with which he was charged.
What followed the summation and charge to the jury was the stuff of nightmares. In New South Wales at the time, only a unanimous jury could deliver a conviction, or acquittal. A hung jury would result in a retrial. What, I asked myself, was the worse thing to do? Ignore the judge’s explicit directions to us, disregard what I had concluded to be reasonable doubt according to the legal definition, and do society a favour by sending away a man whom logically I saw as most likely guilty? A man only a few years younger than myself, deprived of his liberty for the better part of the rest of his life? Or should I follow the judge’s directions precisely, vote to acquit, knowing ten other jurors would never agree, and force a retrial, possibly allowing a guilty man free in the community? To whom was my primary duty? Under the circumstances, I decided I had no option but to argue to acquit – to support, as I called it above, the least worst system we have.
Enclosed in a tiny room, I endured two days of screaming, intimidation, abuse and even threats. At which point, the other ten jurors, realising there was no prospect of changing our minds and, after a couple of attempts by the judge to urge us to deliberate further, he accepted that no verdict was possible, forced us all to swear an oath to that effect, and discharged us.
I had rescued a guilty man from jail – a Muslim man, not that that has any relevance – until his retrial, at any rate.
And shaved off a piece of my soul in the process. After we were discharged, we were made privy to evidence withheld from us beforehand as inadmissible, evidence which confirmed his guilt beyond all doubt. Given the cost of court, judge, counsel and court staff, I estimated my actions had cost the state of New South Wales all up, somewhere in the region of couple of million dollars. For me, it was the stuff of nightmares, quite literally: I suffered them for months afterwards, along with endless, nagging self-doubt. Eventually, I sought the services of a professional counsellor, attached to the court and who specialized in dealing with the trauma of ex-jurors in my position. This man – a captain in the Salvation Army – did a marvellous job of helping me put these events into perspective, and from that day to this, I have never failed to give to the Salvos whenever they have asked.
Can you see now why I fully support the jury system as it now exists? For even if the man on trial had not committed the crime, and you had a jury of twelve nasty little bigots who would convict him on some pretext or other, nullifying the judge’s directions, the Court of Criminal Appeals would have swiftly overturned the guilty verdict, and the man would be free. The “least worst system” actually works.
And having lived through this crucible, you will also understand the derision with which I regard the petulant whining and childish threats, which many of you have now read, which I received earlier today from a foolish and self-important young extremist, who appears to regard my private blog as his public soapbox, by some kind of divine right. Many of you have now endorsed my decision to exclude this individual from LibertyGibbert from now on; to do
otherwise, as you have agreed, would be to trample on the Liberty of all my other guests. After all, my hospitality can be abused for only so long.
And now for something different:
https://libertygibbert.wordpress.com/2012/05/11/comparative-advantage-worth-it-on-balance/