Nullification
The rise of fascism scores another victory.
A federal jury in Las Vegas refused Tuesday to convict four defendants who were retried on accusations that they threatened and assaulted federal agents by wielding assault weapons in a 2014 confrontation to stop a cattle roundup near the Nevada ranch of states’ rights figure Cliven Bundy.
In a stunning setback to federal prosecutors planning to try the Bundy family patriarch and two adult sons later this year, the jury acquitted Ricky Lovelien and Steven Stewart of all 10 charges, and delivered not-guilty findings on most charges against Scott Drexler and Eric Parker.
So there you have it. If you’re right-wing enough and white enough and male enough you can hold federal law enforcement officers hostage at gunpoint and get away with it. Open season, folks.
“Random people off the streets, these jurors, they told the government again that we’re not going to put up with tyranny,” said a John Lamb, a Montana resident who attended almost all the five weeks of trial, which began with jury selection July 10.
“They’ve been tried twice and found not guilty,” Bundy family matriarch Carol Bundy said outside court. “We the people are not guilty.”
They’re not going to put up with “tyranny” – meaning, the “tyranny” of having to pay to graze their personal cattle on public land.
None of the defendants was found guilty of a key conspiracy charge alleging that they plotted with Bundy family members to form a self-styled militia and prevent the lawful enforcement of multiple court orders to remove Bundy cattle from arid desert rangeland in what is now the Gold Butte National Monument.
Bundy stopped paying grazing fees decades ago, saying he refused to recognize federal authority over public land where he said his family grazed cattle since the early 1900s. The dispute has roots a nearly half-century fight over public lands in Nevada and the West, where the federal government controls vast expanses of land.
…
All four men were photographed carrying assault-style weapons during the standoff near the Nevada town of Bunkerville, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas. Each had faced the possibility of decades in federal prison if they were convicted.
Jurors saw images of Parker and Drexler in prone shooting positions looking down their rifles through slots in the concrete barrier of an Interstate 15 freeway overpass toward heavily armed federal agents guarding a corral of cows below.
Defense attorneys noted that no shots were fired and no one was injured. They cast the tense standoff with more than 100 men, women and children in the potential crossfire as an ultimately peaceful protest involving people upset about aggressive tactics used by federal land managers against Bundy family members.
It’s not a “peaceful” protest if you’re pointing a gun. Being “upset” doesn’t change that.
The fasicsts will be having one hell of a party today.
So, if I hold someone at gunpoint and demand all their money, it’s a peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights and their exercise of charity, with the fact that a lethal weapon and a promise to shoot them if they do not donate being essentially irrelevant?
Well. Very nice to know the commitment of the right to law and order.
Jeff, to answer your question we need more information. What’s your gender, religion and race? Careful with your answers. You only get the “Get Out of Jail Free” card if they all line up just right.
Aggressive? Like, armed assault rifles to seize control of a federal property where the employees didn’t have assault rifles? And probably weren’t armed, except for security folks? Aggressive? Like, saying “you have to pay for using the land owned by everybody”?
I wonder if the prosecution informed the jurors of how much it was costing each of them every year to pay for the Bundy’s running their cattle on federal land? Did they know that the Bundy’s are rich because they have pitched in so much to upkeep and maintenance of the federal grasslands?
I think it’s time to rename this country the Untied States of America. We have truly become unhinged.
This is seriously fucked up. In the States, Does a Judge have the power to set a side a Jury verdict that is not supported by the facts and law? It happens very very rarely here, but I can vaguely recall one instance.
Rob,
Not in the case of an acquittal in a criminal case, no. A guilty verdict can be overturned, and any verdict in a civil case, but a not guilty verdict in a criminal matter is final.
I believe there’s a rarely-applied exception if the factfinder was bribed or otherwise corrupted, but your question was about a verdict “not supported by the facts and law.” And in some circumstances, a subsequent prosecution by a different government (state vs. federal, or one state vs. another) may be possible, but that’s a longer discussion.
So federal prosecutors have no trouble putting unarmed black men in jail but are too incompetent to select a jury to convict armed aggressors against the federal government? Or do they just suck at their job if plea deals don’t come up?
BKiSA, I suspect it wasn’t so much that the government is too incompetent to select a jury, but that the defense managed to pack the jury. The problem is that it can be very hard to exclude someone from a jury for cause; when I was on jury duty, the judge overruled several cases where they tried to exclude someone for cause that seemed very reasonable to me (such as on an assault case where the defense tried to exclude someone who had themselves been assaulted on the grounds that it could prejudice their impartiality. The juror said it wouldn’t, so the judge said they had to accept them). In this case, it just may be that there wasn’t any obvious reason to exclude people from the jury, because you can’t always tell if a juror has a preference one way or the other, unless they compromise themselves by blurting something out or talking to the press.
Frankly, I don’t have a lot of confidence in trial by jury, because I have seen too many cases of how lawyers manipulate the jury selection process.
Guilty verdicts require 12 of 12 jurors to vote guilty. If one of twelve simply refuses to budge from a not guilty vote, the jury does not convict. The article does imply the juries were hung that way.
So – if the defense can get a single juror in each group of twelve unwilling to recognize a white terrorist, terrorism goes without a criminal penalty. It’s the same thing that made convicting white murderers of blacks in the “old” South so unlikely, regardless of evidence.
@Jeff Engel
That’s interesting. In the UK, if we can’t reach an absolute majority, (after direction by the judge and a deliberation period of not less than two hours) we accept a 10-2 majority jury. Otherwise the jury is considered hung.
Since Waco and Randy Weaver armed right-wing anarchists have been granted effective immunity. The feds pointedly failed to follow up on Timothy McVeigh’s connection with the ‘compound’ at Elohim City. The IRS never acted against ‘church’ fronts for the Republican party.
And in locales like Eastern Washington, Idaho, and Nevada, I worry about seating jury that isn’t infiltrated with supporters. The way Klansmen sat in judgment of each other through the Civil Rights era.