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Cannabis Campaigners' Guide News Database result:
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UK: Two Fingers To Cannabis Juries
ccguide Monday 03 Apr 2000 Pubdate: Mon, 3 Apr 2000 Source: Guardian, The (UK) Copyright: Guardian Media Group 2000 Contact: Website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Author: Marcel Berlins TWO FINGERS TO CANNABIS JURIES One of the glories of the jury system, and one of its great virtues, is that every now and again a jury comes up with a "not guilty" verdict when the evidence and the law point to guilty. It's a "perverse" verdict, to use the legal jargon, but perverse in the most honourable way possible. The jury is saying "We do not think this prosecution should have been brought. Never mind what the law says, we think this case is wrong and oppressive, and we mark our disapproval by acquitting the defendant". Juries have done this through the ages, from the acquittal of William Penn in 1670 (for which the judge sent the jurors to prison) to more recent examples such as Clive Ponting and the two men, Randle and Pottle, who helped the spy George Blake escape. Most recently a number of juries have acquitted people brought to court for possessing and sometimes cultivating cannabis when the accused, a sufferer from multiple sclerosis, claims that he only smoked the drug to alleviate his pain and distress. That is not a defence to the charge (except by unrealistically stretching the defence of necessity); but it has allowed juries to demonstrate their displeasure with the prosecution. The government has now made it clear that it does not intend to relax the law to exempt such sufferers. So we might have expected that juries would continue to show their feelings by more acquittals. But hang on. These cannabis offences are "either-way" crimes, from which Jack Straw is trying to remove the accused's right to trial by jury. If he gets his way, not only would defendants be denied their choice; juries would lose their centuries-old right to put two fingers up to government. A jury, the great Lord Devlin wrote, is "an insurance that the criminal law will conform to the ordinary man's idea of what is fair and just. If it does not, the jury will not be a party to its enforcement." Except when Jack Straw says otherwise. - --- MAP posted-by: Doc-Hawk
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