The 6th Amendment guarantees the accused the right to a trial by a jury of their peers.
The flip side of that amendment is that the 6th Amendment creates an individual duty to decide the innocence or guilt of an individual. The juror's power to render such a decision, and the jury's power to return a verdict are constitutionally-derived powers.
Where there is a conflict between a constitutional power and a legislated law, the constitution always supersedes. The juror is constitutionally obligated to apply their own sense of rationality in determining whether to convict or acquit. Where strictly applying legislated law would be unjust and/or absurd, the jurors are the only people with a direct, constitutional power to prevent that injustice.
Jurors are often asked "Do you have any belief that might prevent you from making a decision solely on the basis of the law?". The constitution is law. A belief based on the constitution is a belief based on the law.
Just to piggyback off of this: trial-by-jury in the US is nearly nonexistent now. Less than 10% of arrests lead to a jury trial. Most go to a plea bargain.
The state no longer has to convince 12 of your peers that you're guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. They just need to convince you that you'll suffer more if you maintain innocence than if you accept guilt.
Best explanation of the power behind it I've ever seen. We need to add it to the poster I'm thinking of. Do you know anyone or an org in Manhattan we could get to post papers supporting Luigi for in self defense or in defense of others? I'd like to do a QR code to a site explaining jury nullification, why you can't talk about it, and now that it's your constitutional right and you can do it without lying to a judge.
Zimmerman and Rittenhouse were found innocent because they killed both a black guy and white people protesting for the rights of black people.
That's all you need to know really.
Edited for clarity: Since reading comprehension seems to be a lost art. Zimmernman killed a black guy, Rittenhouse killed whites protesting for black rights
I am not saying Rittenhouse killed anyone who was black.
So not to be the wet blanket but I'm pretty sure they didn't have a terrorism law in SC at the time. The Feds charged him with the more appropriate hate crimes.
HTS are terrorist, hamas are terrorists, everyone's a terrorist if you're on the losing side. Then when you win everyone suddenly needs to make a swift but uncomfortable change, like with HTS, to acknowledge you, without saying anything like ' maybe we were wrong all along?'. No no, of course we were right, just the situation changed. right...
Remains to be seen what HTS and FSA will do. Gotta be better than Assad but if the headscarf decrees come the women need to be ready to run.
Also Turkey is using the chaos in Syria to attack the Kurdish led, multi-ethnic, gender equal, nonreligious, democratic mutualist territory established in North and Northeast Syria around Rojava. The Turkish government considers Kurds and allies to be terrorists because they want to live on and administer the land they've lived on for thousands of years.
These people running this revolutionary group are so chill they use Arabic for everything despite speaking Kurdish natively. Just to show that everyone is welcome, and more people around there speak Arabic.
Side note: USA supported the Kurds when they kicked the shit out of ISIS/ISIL and al Qaeda. They were even doing close air support for them with A-10s as the Assad dictatorship was falling. Now that Assad is gone the US support vanished.
Parts of the rebel groups that now control Damascus are former ISIS and al Qaeda fighters.
Remember the promises of the Taliban when they retook Afghanistan. The promises were broken and things are at least as bad if not worse than before. These guys who fucked Assad up with brilliant timing could pull something similar.
Sure, but call it what it is. Don't save "terrorist" for people who target the owner class instead of people who want to start race wars with their multiple murders.
I think this Luigi dude shouldn't have been charged with terrorism under New York law, but I can also recognize that Dylann Roof also shouldn't have been charged with terrorism under New York law for killing people in South Carolina.
Roof was literally sentenced to the death penalty for federal hate crime killings, so I'm not sure there was more the prosecutors should have done. And I'm categorically against the death penalty, even for people like Roof, but this is a terrible example of a double standard.
That's the thing everyone says the class war is coming but it's been going on for years maybe decades and we the lower class just don't know or acknowledge it.
A lot of us know it, it's just that our compatriots are apathetic, ill-informed, misinformed, or outright cheerleaders for their enemies. Then someone like this does something and unites most of the working class.
But the distractions keep coming. Culture war. Race. Punisher stickers. Immigrants replacing whites. The War on fucking Christmas. Don't Tread on Me until you're done Treading on my neighbor who is below me in the psychopathic internalized hierarchy.
The so-called richest man on earth trying to direct the US Congress on which bill to pass...publicly!
I was trying to find this example earlier today and couldn't. I know there definitely has to be some kind of hate crime or mass murder by a white person that wasn't called terrorism, but Luigi though...
He was charged with terrorism to get a 1st degree murder charge in New York state. Otherwise, they couldn't charge that. Cute post, but it's not what happened.
A charge of murder in the first degree is rare in New York because it requires special elements related to the crime to be charged.
Under state law, murder in the first degree only applies to a narrow list of aggravating circumstances, including when the victim is a judge, a police officer or a first responder, or when the killing involves a murder-for-hire or an intent to commit terrorism.
So yeah, they're risking a bit hitting him with that, and yeah, they're going out on a limb because of who the victim was.
Dylann Roof didn't need terrorism for his charges to stick, he was charged with 33 federal counts and 9 state counts of murder in South Carolina, then given the death sentence.
If Dylann killed people in New York it would be different charges because it is a different court with different laws.
Comparing the two really isn't doing Luigi any favors, btw.
I don’t think that they’re trying to make a “gotcha” here. That’s literally the facts of what happened. And, just as they stated, they’re going out on a limb and it could backfire.
Well, you insulted him so now I agree with you. It didn’t make your argument seem weaker and like perhaps you’re the naive one. It didn’t do that, it made a compelling argument that made your position seem more reasonable. Definitely doesn’t make you seem unhinged.