My Web Designer Goes to Jail

Moral of the story? If you want to help someone, don’t call the police on them.

This does bring up a good Libertarian perspective on prison sentences. Let’s say Brian was earning a conservative figure of 100k per year. In theory, he would have been providing about 100k worth of productivity. Given his 7 year prison sentence, Is it really worth 700k to “send the message” that transporting firearms into the state of New Jersey will not be tolerated? And that’s not even throwing in the prison costs of taking a productive person out of society…

This is a great example of why every juror should know about jury nullification.

If I was on that jury, first of all I wouldn’t dream of convicting someone of transporting a legally owned gun. I probably wouldn’t be able to get the rest of the jury to go along, especially in a state like NJ, but I’d try. A hung jury resulting in a mistrial is better than nothing.

Second however, if my jury had asked the judge a question about the law, and the judge refused, I would again push hard for not guilty. This would hold true on any case, not just this one. A jury needs to know the law, and such a refusal leaves me with plenty of reasonable doubt, and I suspect I could persuade the rest of the jury to go along with that.

But when the jury asks the judge three times for such info, and he refuses, I’d say it was a slam dunk that i could persuade them that an injustice would be done if we voted guilty.

Perhaps the best solution is to seek a pardon from Gov. Christie? It seems he wasn’t a fan of this particular judge in the first place.

More generally, UtW is exactly right that calling the police is seldom the right thing to do. One rule of thumb is to only call the police when one is required by law or contract to do so.

“suicidal threats” seems to be the new “disorderly conduct”, in that it’s an excuse for cops to beat the crap out of people. Here in Northern California we had a case where some guy was at the hospital and made a joke about wishing he were dead; two cops followed him to his house, kicked in the door, then Tased him three times (twice while he was thrashing around on the floor).