Our justice system is full of all kinds of nonsense. Anywho, I came across this video on juries this morning, and found it really interesting.
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Not just ours. This just showed on my feed.
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I had no idea the UK allowed guilty verdicts on majority vote by the jury, rather than by unanimous vote like here. That’s not right.
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Believe it or not, non-unanimous jury verdicts were a thing in Oregon even for felony trials until Ramos in 2020. 
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Huh. Four years of law school, one class in Criminal Law, two in Criminal Procedure, and I had no idea.
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We’ve also got some lawmakers trying hard to make a flawed system even worse 
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When it comes to crimes, juries, and prosecutors, we need better oversight. Accountability for those who abuse or manipulate the system seems to come at a glacial pace. Inequity is more visible in cases where members of law enforcement are caught committing crimes. It seems members of the same system won’t enforce the law against each other, even when it makes one department look incompetent or complicit. Maybe there’s a way to remove whatever benefits bad actors receive as a reward for engaging in these practices. 
This highlights why voters really need to pay attention to the prosecutors who are elected/appointed, accused of misconduct, or targeted by partisan efforts to remove or control them.
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Yeah there’s no way the Florida bill will pass Constitutional muster. It clearly violates the First Amendment. Existing defamation law already protects people who really are falsely accused, if they’ve actually suffered harm as a result of the defamation, just like any defamation. If you are bringing a claim of defamation, the burden is on you, as the plaintiff, to prove that claim. That law would shift the burden to the defendant, and that’s just not how torts work. And it’s unnecessary. That’s just more culture war nonsense.
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Greg Abbott just issued a proclamation that’s drifting towards secession. I’m commenting on it here because of this part:
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border. That is why the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.” Arizona v. United States, 567 U.S. 387, 419 (2012) (Scalia, J., dissenting).
The part I highlighted is a dissenting opinion from a Supreme Court case. Dissenting opinions are, obviously, not law. You don’t cite dissenting opinions to build your case. You can use a quote from a dissenting opinion, as long as you have some other arguments to go along with it, and some actual majority opinions that are law. You learn this in your first legal writing class in law school. Ugh, this guy.
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Even the seceeding states of the civil war South didn’t have an answer for the Supremacy Clause, which is why the US Government essentially ignored (from a legal standpoint; not a military one) their state declarations of secession. They had no power in law. That’s why the South had to initiate the war. The US government was prohibited by the Constitution from attacking member states, regardless of the idiotic laws (that were meaningless when they conflicted with federal ones) and pointless proclamations.
But if Abbott keeps pushing Texas actions on the border, he’s going to get his ass arrested, governor or no.
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I mean, he’s literally ignoring a Supreme Court decision from last week now. He’s begging Biden to slap him down, and if Biden does, he’s probably going to use that as an argument to invoke the 14th Amendment and try to take Biden off the ballot in Texas.
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