Remembering
Sept. 11, 2001 |
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What kind of Americans
sit on our juries?
By John Silveira
Our jury system is supposed to be a buffer between us--the citizens--and the
government. It is there to prevent the abuse of power that governments have
exercised since the dawn of civilization. Juries do not exist as an arm of
the court, rather they are there as an arm of the people so that our own
government can never arbitrarily throw those it has accused of crimes into
jails like some banana republic dictatorships do. Nor can it fine them,
confiscate their property, or execute them without the
people’s consent. Juries are not minions of the bureaucrats, the
elected officials, or even the judges. They are there for us and are, in
fact, the most powerful force in any courtroom where they are allowed to
sit. To men like Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Washington there seemed to
be no way such a system could be subverted.
But in the early 1960s Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, conducted an
experiment to gain insight into how ordinary Germans could have staffed
concentration camps and sent millions to their deaths. The Germans in
question were ordinary folks who should have known the difference between
right and wrong. Milgram devised a little test to see how they could have
gone wrong.
Here’s what Milgram did: Participants were enlisted as “teachers” while
others were enlisted as “learners.” Each teacher was paired with a learner
and the learners were to read a list of word-pairs. When the learner was
given one of the words in a word-pair, he was to recite the other word. All
the learner had to do was give the proper response, but if he failed, the
teacher was to administer a shock. The shocks could be gentle, or severe.
They ranged up to 450 volts. It was, to all appearances, a test to see how
well the learners could learn with this “shock therapy.”
But, in reality, the learners were not being tested at all. It was the
teachers themselves who were bing tested. The learning tests were rigged,
the shocks were faked, and the learners cries of pain were phony. What
Milgram wanted to discover was how willingly the teachers would administer
pain. Most scientists didn’t believe more than a small percentage of
Americans would willingly inflict pain in such an experiment. What Milgram
discovered was that, although some of the teachers did refuse to, many
others--fully 60 percent--willingly administered shocks of greater and
greater intensity and duration.
Why were they willing to overlook the “pain” they inflicted on the hapless
learners? They did this because they wanted to please
the scientists conducting the experiment. It was, in other words, to please
authority.
Here’s my point: In a courtroom, as soon as the judge, a government
employee, asks jurors, the now routine question, if they are willing to
bring a verdict of guilty, if the prosecutor proves his case, even if they,
the jurors, disagree with the law, the judge is taking the position of the
scientist (Milgram) who conducted the test; the jurors are now in the
position of the “teachers.”
Now, if Milgram’s percentage held true, and
fully 60 percent of the population would bring a verdict of guilty even if
they felt the law was wrong--or evil. That, of course, leaves the other 40
percent to vote their conscience. Since it only takes one dissenting juror
to hang a jury, the likelihood of a guilty verdict being administered for
violation of a bad law should be negligible.
As a mathematician, I can
calculate the chance that at least one person on a jury of 12 and would
prevent bad laws from being executed. The chances are about 458 to 1 that
the average jury would have at least one person who would stand in the way
of Americans being found guilty of bad laws. With such odds prosecutors
should find it so risky to try people for violation bad laws that they would
cease to prosecute them. Legislators should then find it necessary to
rescind such laws. It is what the Founding Fathers of this country intended
and it was the way the court system in this country originally operated.
But here’s the catch: Today, when judges ask jurors, “Will you bring a
verdict of guilty, even if you disagree with the law?” all prospective
jurors who say they would not bring a verdict of guilty when they
feel the law is wrong are systematically excluded from the jury.
This happens today all over America.
And it is not untypical for the judge to go on and extract an oath from the
remaining jurors (an oath that is nonbinding, though most jurors don’t know
this) to bring a guilty verdict if the prosecutor proves his case beyond a
reasonable doubt, even though they may feel the law is unjust.
What this means is that if you yourself are on trial, your fellow citizens
who have been allowed to fill the jury box are the “teachers” in Milgram’s
experiment who are willing to inflict pain, at your expense, to please
authority--in this case, the judge. Furthermore, if you yourself are seated
on a jury, it is because the judge has already determined that you are part
of that 60 percent that is willing to inflict pain, even when you know it’s
wrong. How does this make you feel?
Silveira's View Archive
John Silveira is the Senior Editor at Backwoods Home Magazine.
His email address is john@backwoodshome.com
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