American Thinker\Clarice Feldman:
So many of this week’s top news stories involve legal matters in Washington, D.C. that I’m making it the focus of this week’s column.
There’s the Roger Stone case, the decision to close the investigation into Andrew McCabe over the Horowitz referral that indicated that he had lied to the FBI about the Clinton email leak, and Congressman Jerry Nadler’s calling Attorney General William Barr as a witness in an upcoming hearing.
(a) The Problem with DC juries
Washington, D.C. has a relatively small population from which jurors must be found for the federal and local grand juries, petit juries, and civil juries. People who serve on these juries must be citizens with no felony convictions, people with no connection to the attorneys or parties, and must have no bias respecting the matter tried. Since almost 80% of the city are Democratic voters, often employed by the government or are connected to law enforcement or have family members who are, the ability to expeditiously find panels in criminal cases is limited. Worse yet, the chance of an unbiased panel in a case involving Republican figures is minimal. If you think this puts Republican figures at far greater risk than Democrats, you are certainly not wrong. Recall if you will the prosecutor who publicly stated the Starr special counsel’s office believed Hillary Clinton had lied to the grand jury, but because ethical prosecutors are not to bring cases they have no reasonable likelihood of winning and no D.C. jury would convict her, they were declining to prosecute her.
Potential jurors are given questionnaires to fill out under oath, on penalty of perjury, in an effort to determine any biases. After which they may be called still under oath in a process called voir dire to answer further questions from the judge and lawyers to determine if they should be excused or empaneled to sit on the jury. Prosecutors get to strike peremptorily six people from the jury and the defense gets to strike 10. In addition, on its own initiative, the court can strike any for cause.
h/t Forcibly Deranged.
…also, the judge can deny the preemptory challenges if s/he believes you are, for example, kicking off too many Black people.
Given that DC is MOSTLY Black, this gets to be a pretty easy jury manipulation tool for the busy activist liberal judge, and one that NO politician can challenge…
That explains why we haven’t seen justice yet and probably never will.
…all of which makes me wonder why the first motion for ANY non-Democrat lawyer isn’t for Change of Venue…
The justice system is completely corrupt and look who’s behind it all, democrats of course.
“The justice system is completely corrupt and look who’s behind it all, democrats of course.”
our biggest disconnect is believing there is a bit of difference between the two parties
they are just two sides of the same coin
pretending this isn’t so is one of the reasons why we are we are
@gin blossom
Exactly! Could it be ‘they’ like things as they are?
What we continue to fail to see is that there are not two sides of politics; they are almost all corrupt or have those huge skeletons in their closets, that obamination’s spies hold over their heads.
Plus the threat of committing suicide by hillaryization is a huge hammer held over their heads.
Donald needs to kick ‘justice’ into high gear after his historic win in November.
Don’t forget that most of the DC judges fit into the ‘excusable’category.
Since Africans consider themselves to be a different culture and group within a group why are they even allowed on juries trying cases of other races and cultures? Remember OJ had a mostly African Jury which admitted that they acquitted him in order to stick it to the man and to justice!!
Doesn’t make any difference.
DC jurors are morons.
I knew a guy who sat on a DC jury and even though the guy (accused) was found with the cell phone on his person, they refused to convict him of assault because the guy from whom the phone was stolen was blind-sided into unconsciousness and didn’t see who hit him.
Another jury, in a different case, when asked by the Judge to deliver their verdict, asked the Judge if: “We could find for both sides?”
izlamo delenda est …