PIML 96051503 / Forwarded to Patriot Information Mailing List: [Don't stop reading because this concerns only black people; it doesn't. It concerns all citizens.] PIML Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 16:00:49 -0700 (MST) From: "L. A. ANDERSON" Subject: FIJA> The need for jury veto Excert from.... The Zychik Chronicle- ------------Righteous Racism & The War on Drugs (New York Times) Essentially the political class, the elected gangsters, the mobsters with a friendly face don't think past the next vote. To them there is no reality except the puffs of smoke that billow from the latest poll. You, on the other hand, must look to reality to outsmart the "common good" and the "will of Congress" and the "power of the presidency." Let's not forget the DEA, the Department of Motor Vehicles, the housing inspectors, and every other brand of petty Gestapo who want to take your freedoms and your hard- earned money. What they have is the guns. What you have are your wits and the remaining fragments of the Constitution. So the first question is: are you smart enough and is the Constitution powerful enough to outlast Fascism in America brought to you by the Democrats and the Republicans? Answer: absolutely yes. The Constitution provides basic protections that are not dependent on anything other than the fact of citizenship. Those protections were set up to defeat the fascism we live with today. Personally, I believe that the Founding Fathers were a hell of a lot smarter than Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. I feel sorry for anyone who doesn't grasp the importance of the previous sentence. Now let's look at the future. We'll start off by discussing the present. Yesterday, the Supreme Court upheld racism in the war on drugs. I've written extensively on this issue in the past, so only a brief recap follows: Higher sentences are mandated for users of crack cocaine. Crack cocaine is a primarily Black drug. Hence Blacks are sentenced to jail for periods of up to 10 times longer than non-Blacks. The pretense behind this sentencing abomination is that crack is associated with a higher level of crime. However, on that basis, all Blacks who are given parking tickets should be arrested for auto-theft; all Blacks who drink should be arrested for drunken disorderly; all Blacks who show anger should be arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. The reason I say this is that culturally Blacks have a higher rate of crime than the rest of the population. By singling out crack as a high crime drug, the courts merely singled out Blacks. To put it another way, if the preference of Blacks had been speed, then the courts would have singled out speed as the high crime drug. In other words, the law by design is racist. The Supreme Court's reasoning was that although Blacks are primarily prosecuted for crack offenses, these prosecutions were not racist because the law was being followed. In other words, slavery was not racist because it was legal. The Holocaust was not incomprehensibly evil. It was legal. Welcome to Fascism in AmeriKKKa, comrade. Unfortunately most of my readers have not had first hand contact with the drug world or with the oppression that Blacks live with. So let me give you a simple story. It's so simple and apparently harmless that the evil underlying it can be easily missed: To support the drug rehab center that I started I opened a thrift shop to be run by the drug addicts. Most of them were Black and most of the clientele were Black. One day a customer who I had a good rapport with came in and bought a broken TV. He wanted it for parts. Total cost: $5. Before he left he asked me for a receipt. Curiously, I asked, "What do you want a receipt for. It's a broken down piece of junk?" He said, "In my neighborhood you don't carry a TV down the street without a receipt." Think about that. This man was afraid to carry a piece of junk not worth more than $5 down the street - without proof that it belonged to him. Do you live with that fear? Now imagine that the Supreme Court just told you that if you are found with .03 grams of cocaine in your possession you can be sent to jail for the rest of your life. And the gov't that you pay taxes to will do everything it can to make sure you rot in prison. Who said racism in America is dead? Tell it to my friend who won't carry a piece of junk in his neighborhood. Tell it to the Black woman who told me that when she was growing up, her and her mother were constantly afraid that her two brothers would get beaten. By who? The gangs or the cops. Take your pick. Racism is alive and well in the US. Only this time it doesn't hide under the Constitutional protection of slavery. It doesn't hide under the cloak of national security - which led to Japanese Americans being sent to prison camps, oops make that internment camps. Just as most people were caught up in the wave of hate, ignorance and fear that made slavery and race-based internment possible, most people today are drowning in the whirlpool of lies, deception, fear mongering and demagoguery called the War on Drugs. However, every evil ends. The War on Drugs will end. The only question is how and when. The politicians don't bother with that kind of question. Instead, they look for your deepest fears and try to sell you the magic antidote that will make your tummy ache go away. If you have the independence of a thinking adult, your reaction will be "Drop dead." If you don't, you'll ask for another round of snake oil because the first one didn't work. The War on Drugs is snake oil. It's promise is to cure the pain of rampant crime. Well, even pathetic children get sick of lousy medicine that doesn't work. Which brings us to another factor in the end of the war on drugs: An American public nauseated by the sickness of crime and the snake oil cure of a war on drugs. There won't be riots in the streets this time. Instead a concept that is weaving its way back into the fabric of America's thinking will become virtually undeniable. It's called jury-nullification. When the Constitution was written, jury nullification was taken for granted. It wasn't expressly stated in the Constitution because it would have been the equivalent of saying "a jury should deliberate conscientiously." In its drive to wrest power from the citizenry, in 1895, the Supreme Court declared that juries did not have to be told about their rights to nullify the law. However, OJ Simpson and the War on Drugs have brought Jury Nullification back into America's thinking. Enter professor Paul Butler. Butler, a Black man, is a former federal prosecutor. He has been on national talk shows, has had articles in national magazines and is a leading figure in the Black legal scene. Butler's message: Blacks should use jury-nullification to let Black drug defendants go free. Yes, it's racist in its theme. But, without Blacks as the target, the war on drugs could not have gone on as long as it has. Also, Butler is being approached by other activists to widen his message to include defendants of all races. If you want to find out more about the movement that's going to become more powerful than the Repubs or the Dems call 1-800-TEL-JURY (1-800- 835-5879) One of the factors that brought Alcohol Prohibition to a screeching halt was the inability of prosecutors to get convictions because of jury nullification. Now that the Supreme Court has blatantly declared itself as racist - and forget about Clarence Thomas, there were Black slave owners also - Butler's message is the Blacks' best hope. In fact, it was jury nullification that protected Black slaves escaping to the North. The war on drugs has always been racist. Check out my homepage for details http://www.pacificnet.net/~jzychik/JoeJav.html Anyway, live by racism, die by racism. The War on Drugs is about to meet righteous racism. The War on Drugs will lose. Because there's more than righteous racism opposing it. The War on Drugs is a violation of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It's a violation of the 4th, and 5th amendment - for starters. The politicians are betting their political careers on the War on Drugs. In the short run, they'll win. In the long run, the question is who do you want to bet on: Dole/Clinton or Washington/Jefferson? I feel sorry for anyone who has to think about the answer. Joe Zychik Editor, The Zychik Chronicle ------- Posted daily Mon-Fri after 3 pm PST at http://www.pacificnet.net/~jzychik To receive the ZC, free, contact: jzychik@pacificnet.net ============================================================ ACLU News *From Prison, Ex-Cops Call Offenses Routine* PHILADELPHIA -- In a front-page copywritten report, The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday detailed the stories of three police officers involved in the biggest police scandal in Philadelphia's history. All three officers readily admit that they committed serious misdeeds in stealing an estimated $100,000 from suspected drug dealers. the Inquirer said. But they also say that much of their illegal activity -- including perjury and fabricating evidence -- was part of the system that police everywhere use in the war on drugs. "Its the system, they say -- they only did what they believed their commanders, politicians and yes -- you the public wanted," Inquirer reporter Mark Fazlollah wrote. He quoted one of the former officers, John Baird: "We didn't own and operate the system. We didn't invent it. We were just some of the many thousands of custodians. We inherited it." The ex-officers made a series of serious allegations, the Inquirer said, including: -- Hundreds of arrests were "bad." Baird told the Inquirer that he never saw a legal drug arrest. -- Groups of black youths hanging out on corners were routinely searched illegally. When drugs were found, the Inquirer said, police reports were fabricated to indicate that a drug sale had been witnessed. The Inquirer said that the ex-officers allegations are likely to add fuel to charges by civil rights lawyers that the Police Department has failed to police itself. David Rudovsky, a lawyer who is leading negotiations between city officials and civil rights groups -- and a member of the ACLU National Board -- told the Inquirer that what the ex-officers have said "reflects a pattern that we have seen independently." Rudovsky told the Inquirer that what the ex-officers said "rings true." "It's not only individual officers," he said. "It was a department that was indifferent to those facts." The Philadelphia Inquirer can be found on the Web at http://www.phillynews.com/inq/front_page/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- For general information about the ACLU, write to info@aclu.org * Patriot Information Mailing List * A service to help inform those who have an active interest in * returning our federal and state governments to limited, * constitutional government * Send messages for consideration and possible posting to * butterb@sagenet.net (Bill Utterback). * To subscribe or unsubscribe, send message with subject line * "subscribe patriot" or "unsubscribe patriot" * Forwarded messages sent on this mailing list are NOT verified. * See World's Smallest Political Quiz: www.self-gov.org/quiz.html * Libertarian is to LIBERTY as librarian is to library (DePena) * PIML grants permission to copy and repost this message * in its entirety with headers and trailers left intact.