These Amarillo Jurors ROCK! The jury took just 11 minutes to acquit Tim Stevens, 53,.who uses medical marijuana to treat the symptoms of HIV. "It's time for legislators in Texas and around the country to follow the public's lead and take action to protect patients, so that no one battling a life-threatening illness has to live in fear of arrest,"said Ray Warren, director of state policies for the Marijuana Policy Project in Washington, D.C., and a former North Carolina Superior Court judge.
We are rebels with just cause,
when we exercise our right to nullify bad laws
like those brave jurors who refused to convict
during the hard times of the Fugitive Slave Act, way back
and until FDR said the Volstead Act was licked!
Jury nullification is a constitutional power tool
we the people pack.
The Controlled Substances Act is one of those bad laws like the Fugitive Slave Act and the Volstead Act. When more juries refuse to convict on "drug crime," drug warriors will be politically dead bodies. Jury nullification is a constitutional power tool we the people pack!
There is a problem: if you disagree with the drug war on moral grounds, you will not be chosen for jury duty.
The solution is to keep an open mind and insist that you will listen fairly to all the evidence presented, tell them honestly that you care passionately about the law, and that you'll withhold decision until you've heard the entire case. Getting on that jury is the first step. After closing arguments are through and the judge has instructed you on the law, you have earned the opportunity to refuse to convict on nonviolent drug crime.
Cannabis is one of the most benign chemicals we can ingest. Arresting nonviolent people for making a safer health choice in a medicinal/recreational drug is scandalous reefer madness. Can law enforcement find something better to do?
Considering that across the US last year 40% of the murders, almost 60% of the rapes and about half of the aggravated assaults went unsolved, there is plenty of enforcement work available on these threats to public safety. The horrendous cumulative effect of present use of enforcement resources is becoming obvious. While we police individual recreational and medicinal use of drugs; murderers and violent sexual predators roam free.
Get tough on violent crime!
Warriors can get their adrenaline rush
increasing public safety; chasing killers and other violent predators.
Prohibition fuels corruption
of public officials and injustice in our
courts. It triggers violence in our streets and along
our borders. It
incites terrorists by forcing senseless policy on other countries. The black
market supports despicable people who sell to children and who recruit them
to sell to their peers. The statistics reveal that racism is epidemic in the
drug war.
Have legislators and law enforcement,
"inadvertently," constructed a
pipeline
for our youth to prison, especially Blacks and Hispanics?
Puritanism and racism definitely contribute to the current quagmire, don't
they? Restore justice in America; construct science based drug policies about
saving and rehabilitating instead
of ruining lives.
Special interests like the pharmaceutical, prison and defense industries, lobby for harsher drug laws and a military approach to drug enforcement. Others are disinclined to support a dialogue that could lead to more effective courses of action because they benefit from the current policy. All special interests show no concern for the damages caused to others by this harsh compassionless policy.
US Representative Barney Frank
announced he plans to file a federal bill to legalize "small amounts"
of marijuana, on the HBO show "Real Time," hosted by Bill Maher.
Ask your Congressperson
to cosponsor the "Make Room for Serious Criminals" bill.
"Vices are not crimes,"to put it succinctly, as Lysander Spooner did long ago. Libertarians defend the right of anyone to do many things other people, may personally consider immoral, reprehensible, stupid and even self-destructive. We believe as our Founding Fathers did in individual free choice, less government and free speech.
Former presidential Candidate Mike Gravel is now a card carrying Libertarian. The obvious growing acceptance of libertarian ideas in mainstream America is reflected in Ron Paul's shockingly strong campaign. It also shows in our large and growing rejection of the unethical politics or the status quo.
Barry Cooper is running for Congress as a Libertarian candidate in the 31st Texas Congressional District. He advocates the legalization of all drugs and believes, "American cages were intended to house the violent." They were certainly never intended to be money makers for government and other opportunists without ethics.
Stop drug war violence! Legalizing and regulating drug distribution would immediately cut off the major source of funding for terrorists worldwide and could increase our tax base.
Support for the war on drugs
is inconsistent with support for individual freedom, Constitutional or small
government and the teachings of Jesus, the Prince of Peace