How FIJA Saved My Life!

[DdC]

Anglo-Saxon common law right of claiming a "necessity" to break the law,
because doing so prevented a greater harm... Rob Waddell

Our American Common Law

How FIJA Saved My Life! By D. Paul Stanford 
Source: CRRH  December 19, 1999
The Fully Informed Jury Act (FIJA) saved my life and I'm happy to be a free man here today to tell this story. I am both the founder of Tree Free EcoPaper, the oldest hemp business in the USA today, and one of the activists that formulated a proposal to regulate cannabis, the Oregon Cannabis Tax Act, that is being advanced via the initiative process in Oregon by our PAC, Campaign for the Restoration and Regulation of Hemp. I was acquitted of growing marijuana in federal court in a trial in December of 1993.
continued... http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread4055.shtml

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"The Jury has the power to bring a verdict in the teeth of both law and fact"
- Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

An Essay on the Trial by Jury — Lysander Spooner

"The law itself is on trial quite as much as the case which is to be decided"
- Judge Harlan F. Stone, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, 1941-1946

Jury rights quotes — Lone Star FIJA

"unreviewable and irreversible power [of the jury] to acquit in disregard of the instruction of the law given by the trial judge. The pages of history shine upon instances of the jury's exercise of its prerogative to disregard instructions of the judge"
D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, 1972

In Jury Rooms, Form of Civil Protest Grows — Washington Post
Also: www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v99.n472.a03.html

Erowid Freedom Vault : Jury Nullification

Trial by jury — Cato Institute

"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts"
- Samuel Chase, US Supreme Court Chief Justice 1796

Fully Informed Jury Association

Jury Nullification and the Rule of Law
"Jury nullification" means that a jury finds a defendant innocent because the law itself is unjust, or is unjust in a particular application, and so should not be applied.

Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law.
Calvin Coolidge, to the Massachusetts State Senate

DEA Raids Medical Marijuana Garden
of L.A. Patient Sister Somayah
Los Angeles, Oct 8, 2003
In a resumption of the federal government's war on medical marijuana, DEA agents raided the backyard garden of a well known Los Angeles patient advocate, Sister Somayah Kambui, who was acquitted in a high-profile Prop 215 jury trial last year.
continued... http://www.canorml.org/news/Somayahdeabust.html

"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor yet imagined by man,
by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."
Thomas Jefferson

LA Jury Acquits Sister Somayah of Medical Marijuana Charges

Los Angeles, March 18th. In a milestone victory for patients in Southern California, a Los Angeles jury acquitted Sister Somayah Kambui, who had been charged with growing medical marijuana in her backyard.

Somayah who also runs the Crescent Alliance Self-Help for Sickle Cell patients' group, used the marijuana to relieve chronic pain from sickle cell anemia. She was acquitted on five separate cannabis-related charges despite evidence that she had substantially more marijuana than necessary for her own personal use.

Police claimed that her garden had 200 pounds "wet" weight of marijuana, including stems and root balls. Defense witness Chris Conrad estimated the gardens true yield at 11 to 25 pounds of usable bud and leaf.

In addition, Somayah had six pounds of processed leaf and a quantity of hemp seed and oil, which the prosecution tried to charge as hash oil. Prosecutors charged that she had too much for personal use and was distributing from her home.

Somayah took full responsibility for the garden. She testified that she had been too sick to act as an official Prop. 215 caregiver for other patients in the last year, though some witnesses indicated that she had shared her medicine with them in the past. She said that the Crescent Alliance only used her home as a meeting-place.

Somayah spent 60 days in jail awaiting trial. She complained that she had not been able to harvest her crops for several years in a row because repeated police raids had wiped out her gardens. In 1998, she was arrested on cultivation charges, but was released and had her plants returned under Prop. 215.

She also has two previous "strikes" for weapons charges from the 1970s, when she was active in the Black Panthers. However, prosecutors suggested they would not press for a Third Strike sentence, given the non-violent nature of her offense.

Somayah said she felt "vindicated" by the verdict, the first Prop 215 cultivation acquittal in the nation's largest county. Her court-appointed attorney, Robert Welbourn, expressed hope that police would finally leave her alone.
continued... http://www.canorml.org/news/somayahacquitted.html



The Common Law and other Historical Documents

"The jury has the right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy"
- Chief Justice John Jay USA

jurynulification.com

"It is not only his Right but his duty to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court"
- John Adams (Second USA President)

A HISTORY OF JURY NULLIFICATION

"If a juror accepts as the law that which the judge states, then that juror has accepted the exercise of absolute authority of a government employee and has surrendered a power and right that once was the citizen's safeguard of liberty."
(1788) (2 Elliots Debates, 94, Bancroft, History of the Constitution, 267)