Libertarians Of South Central Kansas (LSOCK) meet for Supper and discussion every Tuesday at Mike's Steakhouse located at 2131 S. Broadway in Wichita, Kansas at 5:30 PM. If we have official business to conduct or a featured guest speaker, that will begin at 6:00 PM. All who support personal responsibility and individual liberty are invited to attend.
To receive the LSOCK NEWS and LSOCK
NEWS Alerts! via email please contact Steven Rosile at sarasile@att.net or 316 618-1339.
Contact the Kansas
Libertarian Party or LSOCK at:
LPKS / LSOCK
P.O. Box 2456
Wichita , Kansas
Ph. (800) 335-1776
LPKS / LSOCK
P.O. Box 2456
Ph. (800) 335-1776
On the Web please go to www.lpks.org
or to the LSOCK Blog at:
IN THIS ISSUE:
- From The Editor
- KSCADP Meets Tuesday, 7PM
- Kelly Wendln, Frankie Moore,
RIP
- Jury Power, Jury Rights! Acquittal and Nullification
1. From The Editor
Hello
everyone,
Libertarians
in northeast Kansas celebrated open carry at a
picnic in a Lenexa
City Park Lenexa
Our party has
gotten a lot of recognition in the press and media the past year or so
(including several mentions in our Wichita Eagle) from challenging several
cities in Johnson County Lenexa ,
Prairie Village
Undeterred,
party members formed a new group, Johnson County Open Carry. This group found
willing LPKS members that reside in these cities to request a permit to hold
picnics in city parks where open carry would be featured. Of course the permits
were denied on the grounds that open carry was banned by local statutes. When
the individual that was requesting the permit made it clear to the Lenexa
city council that he would be filing a lawsuit over the matter they had they
good sense to actually vote to change the statute and allow open carry in Lenexa
Permits have
been granted for Johnson County Open Carry to hold picnics in these two cities
but they will not feature open carry of firearms, only empty holsters. These
are intended to publicize this issue and put pressure on the city councils to
comply with state law.
In Wichita
(and Salina), the city council did change their statutes to allow open carry
when it was pointed out to them that state law now required it. That was over a
year ago and was merely conforming to state law.
However, the
Wichita City Council does not want to allow open carry in a number of city
owned buildings as required by state law if adequate security is not provided.
Armed guards with metal detectors at these city buildings that do not currently
have them are being considered by the council so that they can maintain bans on
open carry. The cost estimates for doing this is around $14.5 million per year.
Wichita
The Wichita
chapter of the Campaign for Liberty
Please click
the above and sign their petition.
The petition
is below and reads:
Petition to Protect our Right to Self
Defense and Stop Wasteful Spending to Wichita’s Mayor and City Council
WHEREAS: The United States and Kansas
Constitutions both recognize the right to self-defense as an unalienable right;
and
WHEREAS: The Kansas legislature recently
passed, and the Kansas governor signed into law, legislation allowing concealed
carry in non-secure public buildings; and
WHEREAS: It will cost an estimated
additional $14.5 million per year in salaries to provide real security for
Wichita public facilities currently posted “Gun Free”.
THEREFORE: The citizens and tax payers of Wichita
I will have printed copies at the
LSOCK Supper Meetings to sign as well.
The Campaign for Liberty, Wichita
Chapter meet the last Thursday of every month at the Wichita Marriot at 7:00 PM
in one of the meeting rooms on the ground floor in the southwest area of the
motel. I try to attend every month as do several other LSOCK members. Hope to
see you there soon.
For Liberty
Steven A. Rosile
Editor, LSOCK NEWS
2. Kansas
Meeting Tuesday, July
30, 7pm, 3450 North Rock Road
(across the street
from Sam's Club on N. Rock Rd.
Bills have been
introduced in both the House and the Senate regarding death penalty abolition
here in Kansas Topeka
, we had a challenging task of developing these new relationships and educating
them on Kansas
For more information
about this organization please go to:
3. Kelly Wendln, Frankie Moore,
RIP
The Freedom Movement
lost two long time activists this past April. Kelly Wendln passed away on April
7 and his long time partner of 41 years, Frankie Moore, passed away just
sixteen days later, on April 23. Kelly was 71 and Frankie was 74. These two
have been at the core of LSOCK’s efforts to educate the public by regularly
handing out Jury Rights information at the Sedgwick County Courthouse for many
years now.
Kelly had made it his
mission in life to protest and advocate change of the 55 MPH speed limit and
motorcycle helmet laws. He challenged these laws in court in and actually appealed three of his cases
to the Kansas Supreme Court, and one of these he appealed to the US Supreme
Court!
He more recently
fought the seat belt law after receiving a ticket for failure to wear his
seatbelt. The charge was dismissed with prejudice when Kelly demanded a jury
trial. The prosecutors said that they dismissed the charges because they didn’t
think that the $10 fine involved was worth the expense of a jury trial. They
may have also been worried that the jury would acquit Kelly since one or more
of them may have been educated on their right to do so by Kelly himself.
These two were active
in LSOCK and another local group you have read about in the LSOCK NEWS, Kansans
Advocating Responsible Zoning (KARZ). Frankie was Secretary of the KARZ group.
She called every KARZ member to remind them of the monthly KARZ meetings. KARZ meets at Spangles
Restaurant at Broadway and Kellogg (US
Kelly and Frankie
will be missed by all who knew them. Gob bless them both.
4. Kansas State
Once again, it is time to prepare for
the Kansas State Fair . We need volunteers to staff the LPKS Outreach Booth,
aka the Politically Homeless Booth, this coming September.
Our booth must have at least one
(preferably two or more) person(s) manning the booth from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM
every day from September 6 through the 15.
That is Friday the 6th to
Sunday the 15th.
I will be doing the scheduling for
this event again this year. The day is split into morning (9 AM to 3 PM) and
evening (3 PM to 9 PM) shifts but I can schedule you for anytime through the day
that you may have available to volunteer.
The LPKS does outreach booths at a
variety of festivals around the state but the Kansas State Fair allows us to
contact a wide cross section of Kansans from all over the entire state at this
one event.
If you want to assist us please
contact me, Steven Rosile, by replying to this email or sarasile@att.net , or calling me at 316
618-1339.
- Jury
Power, Jury Rights! Acquittal and Nullification
by Steven A Rosile
“….to secure these rights Governments
are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.”
Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration
of Independence of the United
States of America
"It may not be amiss, here,
Gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions of fact, it is
the province of the jury, on questions of law, it is the province of the court
to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this
reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless a right to take
upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact
in controversy. On this, and on every other occasion, however, we have no
doubt, you will pay that respect, which is due to the opinion of the court: For,
as on the one hand, it is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts;
it is, on the other hand, presumbable, that the court are the best judges of
the law. But still both objects are lawfully, within your power of
decision."
Chief Justice John Jay in Georgia
v Brailsford, 3 Dallas
“The people are the masters of both
congresses and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but the men who
pervert it”
Abraham Lincoln
“Jury has undisputed power to acquit,
even if its verdict is contrary to law as given by judge and contrary to
evidence
Westlaw Key System, Criminal Law Key
731, also see US v Moylan,
417 F.2d 1002, (1969), US
The Rights referred to above, among
others, include Life, Liberty
It does not mean just electing
officials to enact laws that we must obey. No, it is much grander a concept than
that.
The nobles or people of England England
King John was not popular with the
noblemen. His rule was heavy-handed and arbitrary, so much so that the nobles
felt threatened and drew up what later came to be known as the Magna Carta
(Great Charter). The King and his forces were pursued and then challenged by
superior forces at Runnymede, near London
Among these rights was trial by jury
of ones peers. The King’s laws could be (and often were) ruled invalid by such
a jury. This is the basis of the Common Law right and power of the jury to
nullify the law or the application of the law in the case before it if the
jurors feel the law is unjust or improper or should not apply in the case
before them..
This is the source of the power of the
jury (people) to grant or withhold their consent to laws enacted by Kings or
legislatures.
This power has not been popular with
Kings, courts, legislatures and others so all manner of effort has been exerted
by them through the centuries to limit or evade this power.
In 1670 William Penn was tried in London Gracechurch Street London
The jury in the case came back with a
verdict of Guilty of Speaking in Gracechurch
Street
This enraged the judges who had to
release the defendant, William Penn (yes, that William Penn, who later founded Pennsylvania
They were confined for weeks when a
friend of Bushell convinced a retired Chancery (Ecclesiastical or
Civil) Court Judge to come out of retirement and take on the case of the
imprisoned jurors. The doctrine of Habeas Corpus (bring me the body) had been
established by Magna Carta as well as Trial by Jury but both had long been
ignored by the courts.
The case of these jurors changed that
as the Judge ordered them released. There could be no punishment of
jurors for rendering their verdict whether it pleased the judge(s) or not. This
case established “firmly and finally” the power of the trial jury to judge the
law as well as the facts in the case before them and also the Right of Habeas
Corpus to challenge the unjust imprisonment of persons and why Habeas Corpus is
a civil procedure in a criminal case.
see Penn and Mead's
Case, 6 How. State Tr. 951, and Bushell's Case, Vaughan ,
135, 6 How State
*eds note, September 5, 1670 was the
first day of these jurors confinement. In 1993 Kansas Governor Joan Finney made
a proclamation that September 5 1993, marked the 323rd Anniversary
of that day and would be celebrated as “Jury Rights Day” in their honor.
From the days of Magna Carta onward,
English jurisprudence had deferred to the power of juries to decide criminal
cases in nearly all ways, including the right and power to acquit a man based
on their conscience, which of course is the core value of having a jury in the
first place. Independent citizens tend not to simply rubber-stamp government
activities but instead reject such activities when they become obnoxious to Liberty
In the time before the American
Revolution, some English judges tried to get around this by ordering juries to
return a certain verdict and punishing them for rendering the “wrong” verdict.
This caused a huge debate amongst
English judges as to whether such acts by the courts were legitimate. In the
colonies, when the English judges began interfering with the proper functioning
of juries, this issue became one of the reasons listed in the Declaration of
Independence to justify our separation from England
The colonies, later American States,
adopted the Common Law of England and so these rights are also a part of our
heritage and birthright. Our revolutionaries were originally fighting for their
rights as Englishmen until it became clear that the Crown and Parliament were
not going to respect these rights. Only then did their goal become outright Independence
In New York Colony in 1734, John Peter
Zenger, a newspaper publisher, was arrested and charged under British law with
libel for his criticism of the colony’s Governor. At the time truth was not a
defense to charges of libel under British law. Indeed, truth was deemed more
offensive than unfounded allegations as it was more likely to lead to unrest
and a breech of the King’s Peace.
Zenger was brought to trial in New
York City United States
Later, in what had become the United
States
Slavery was a difficult issue for our
young nation and federal law made aiding a fugitive slave a crime. Citizens of
the northern states protected each other from these laws by refusing to indict
in the Grand Juries and in the extremely rare cases that the government could
get a Grand Jury to indict, there are very few instances that I have found
where a jury in a free state Washington ,
DC
Some sociopolitical forces do not like
the right of the jury to acquit on its conscience and in the late 1800’s the
robber barons were pressuring the government to do something about “lawless
juries” that would not enforce the anti-union labor laws and so the courts
began to refuse to recognize this right even though most of the people were
still aware that they had the power to adjudge a case on their sense of
justice.
The robber barons position eventually
prevailed with the US Supreme Court ruling in Sparf and Hanson v United States,
156 US 51 (1895), a case that specifically (and wrongly) denied the right of
juries to exercise this power.
The Sparf case involved a mutiny on a
vessel in the Pacific ocean that resulted in
death. The defendants were charged with murder and their counsel wanted to
argue to the jury that they might find the defendants guilty of the lesser
charge of manslaughter rather than murder. The prosecutors objected and the
trial court judge ruled for the prosecution.
I want to point out that it does not
make any sense that this case came to be about the right of the jury to render
a verdict based on their conscious when what was involved here was the judge’s
refusal to allow the jury to decide the fact of whether malice was involved.
Malice is one essential difference between murder and manslaughter.
The issue was brought up on appeal to
the US Supreme Court and resulted in one of the most anomalous opinions ever
rendered by that court. Rather than decide the actual controversy of whether
the trial court had usurped the exclusive province of the jury to decide
whether there was credible evidence of malice, they turned it into a question
of whose province, court or juror’s, it is to decide the law.
The Court also leaves it unclear as to
whether it is using common law precedent to decide a case under maritime law,
or whether it is imposing maritime law into common law jurisdiction.
Justice Harlan, writing for the Sparf
majority, revisited the debate on the issue of a jury’s right to determine the
law that transpired between two English judges, Mansfield and Camden Mansfield Mansfield
and Camden , and that Camden
Despite the confusion and uncertainty
resulting from the Supreme Court’s decision in Sparf, the law. Justices Gray
and Shiras, however, in their dissent, showed that there indeed was
disagreement between Mansfield and Camden ,
and that Camden
Despite the confusion and uncertainty
resulting from the Supreme Court’s decision in Sparf, just one year later, in
1896, that same US Supreme Court affirmed a decision of the Kansas Supreme
Court that, under the Kansas Constitution, the jury decides both law and fact .
See In Re Lowe, Appellant, 46 Kan. 255, 26 P.
749 (1891) for this Kansas
The next major event in the timeline
of jury rights was the prohibition of alcohol via constitutional amendment.
There was widespread non-compliance with this and so resulted in corruption of
government officials, the growth of organized crime and turf wars between
competing criminal factions.
The people eventually grew weary of
the corruption and violence and began to exercise their sovereignty by bringing
in verdicts of “not guilty” in increasing numbers of these cases, to the point
that another amendment soon was proposed and ratified ending prohibition. The
people had brought this about by refusing to continue giving their consent to
the law.
In US v Moylan, 417 F.2d 1002 (1969) a
case involving destruction of Selective Service records by priests and nuns,
the 4th Circuit Court Of Appeals ruled that it was error on the part of the
trial judge to deny the right of the jury to acquit based on their conscience.
However, the court stated that this did not rise to reversible error because
the people (jurors) commonly had knowledge of their power to acquit but that
normally they would only do so when they were greatly offended by government
misconduct. This reasoning from Moylan has been used by prosecutors, courts and
legislatures (see Pattern Instructions of Kansas where the Kansas legislature
has mandated that trial judges instruct jurors they must accept the law as he
gives it to them) to justify not allowing defense counsel to remind and inform
jurors of this power.
In fact, while the later ruling by the
DC Circuit Court of Appeals in US v Doughherty, 473 F.2d 1113, 1132 (1972)
plainly states that the jury has “an unreviewable and unreversible power to
acquit in disregard of the instructions on the law given by the trial judge”
that Court ruled that it is not error to fail to inform them of their power.
However, this right has a dark side. I
mention it here to so that you will be aware of it and because it also
illustrates the power does indeed exist in modern times.
In the southern states, at least into
the 1950’s, 60’s and even 70’s, white people on trial for murdering black
people often were acquitted and set free despite overwhelming evidence of their
guilt. This was not a good thing. It came about because black people were not
allowed on juries in the Jim Crow era. Perhaps the OJ Simpson trial put the
shoe on the other foot but in that case I believe it more likely was Detective
Mark Furman’s lies, the gloves not fitting and a few other inconsistencies that
led to the acquittal, not black and minority jurors.
This leads us to what
is a very exciting recent development. Several months ago
(September, 2012) the New
Hampshire
This law had not even yet gone into
effect when a defense attorney requested that a trial judge allow the jury to
be informed of their rights as the new law would soon require. The judge
agreed. This particular defendant was accused of growing several cannabis
plants in his yard. The state’s proof was complete and yet the jury acquitted
him outright.
Now remember, this New Hampshire law
did not grant this right to the jury, the law just mandated that judges inform
them, or allow the defense to inform them of these rights. As mentioned
earlier, this right under common law dates back at least to Magna Carta, 1215
AD. This right and power is referenced in our Declaration of Independence where
it says “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed”
and it is in the jury box, not the ballot box, where this consent is granted or
denied. This is one of the most precious parts of our common law heritage. It
is how the people can control their government(s) and protect their fellow
citizens from bad law/bad government without resorting to violence.
Since the above mentioned case there
have been other recent instances of Jury Nullification. In New
Jersey Minnesota
In an August, 2011 case in Cook
County, IL (Chicago) a woman was charged with eavesdropping/wire-tapping when
she secretly recorded police internal affairs investigators as she was
complaining about an officer that she alleged had sexually harassed her. The
woman believed that the investigators were trying to dissuade her from pressing
charges against the officer so she recorded the interview without the knowledge
or permission of the investigators. In Illinois
However, after this acquittal, the
ACLU challenged the state law in federal court and the federal district court
ruled it unconstitutional. On appeal the federal circuit court of appeals
upheld the lower court ruling and the Cook County Prosecutor appealed to the US
Supreme Court who refused to hear the case, letting the trial court and appeals
court rulings stand. I learned of this case in the email newsletter Liberty
Crier, published by a group of Ron Paul supporters.
Just recently, I have read (also from
a link in Liberty Crier) about San
Diego , California
The Fully Informed Jury Association (www.FIJA.org) has been educating the public
nationwide about this for over twenty years and it is finally beginning to pay
off as this power of jury nullification is being restored to the people’s
minds. This will surely come into play if/when the federal government attempts
to enforce their cannabis drug regulations in Colorado and Washington after
those two states’ cannabis legalization efforts were successful in last
November’s elections.
In Wichita
So, spread the word and help save our Constitutional
Republic
*I want to again
remind you of this other form of nullification, previously mentioned above when
I referred to the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. State legislatures can,
and have recently again begun to, nullify unconstitutional federal law. One
example of this is the Kansas law recently
passed and signed by the Governor which declares firearms and ammunition
manufactured and kept within Kansas
