Jury Trial & Government

"Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other --- or at least no more accurate --- definition of a despotism than this." Lysander Spooner from TRIAL BY JURY 1852

http://lysanderspooner.org/node/35

Spooner exposes the fact that when Judges of the government [representative of the "country"] can determine what evidence and which witnesses may testify it [the court] can manipulate the outcome, and that judges might actually enforce the decision of the jury through Judicial "charging" the jury in such a way as to dictate the outcome of any trial. That the charging of every jury that they are the court of last resort that determines whether any law being enforced is legal and just will be forgotten in the long term and juries will simply become the tool of the government. This of course is exactly what has come to pass in spite of many federal district court and U.S. Supreme Court cases extolling this very important charge as absolutely necessary in every case. But judges rarely if ever even admit that this charging exists much less is required by law.

Loss of our courts to the corporate state, Admiralty Law as opposed to the Law of the Land- Common Law. No theories could be more opposed. The Magna Carta 1215.

"For more than six hundred years, [Spooner wrote in 1852]--- that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 --- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused; but that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws."

It is this principle that guided the States Rights issues addressed in the 1798 Kentucky Resolutions and Virginia Resolutions of 1799.