Please send as far and wide as possible. Thanks, Robert Sterling Editor, The Konformist http://www.konformist.com If you are interested in a free subscription to The Konformist Newswire, please visit http://www.eGroups.com/list/konformist/ and sign up. Or, e-mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject: "I NEED 2 KONFORM!!!" (Okay, you can use something else, but it's a kool catch phrase.) Visit the Klub Konformist at Yahoo!: http://clubs.yahoo.com/clubs/klubkonformist [EMAIL PROTECTED] High Times Online Colorado To Jurors: We Own Your Mind! http://www.hightimes.com/ht/new/9906/laurak.html FILED 06/18/99 DENVER, CO--The Colorado prosecutors who have helped hemp activist Laura Kriho make "jury nullification" a household word across America have not tired in their crusade. Although the state Court of Appeals last April cleared Kriho of criminal charges for voicing her political opinions in a jury room in 1996, the state government itself is now filing for a re-hearing of the case. Kriho's qualms about consigning a teenager to a long stretch in prison for personal-quantity drug possession, and her attempt to articulate them to the other jurors on the case, did indeed constitute "contempt of court," the state itself is now charging. They're insisting that the Appeals justices reverse their reasoning and find Kriho guilty after all--thus keeping the concept of jury nullification foresquare before the public's attention, at no greater cost than a small Rocky Mountain of taxpayer dollars (so far), and about $25,000 that Kriho has had to put up to defend herself. Heresy In The Court! Ironically, Laura Kriho tried to get out of jury duty on that fateful 1996 day, telling a secretary she would have to hitchhike down to the Gilpin County courthouse from her mountain home, but she was told she had to be there. She later found out that she might've been charged $500 with a remote chance of serving jail time if she hadn't shown up. Instead, Kriho wound up fined $1,200 for the contempt-of-court charge, and being dragged back to court again and again and again, for three years and counting. As an alternate-juror candidate, Kriho wasn't even in the jury box during the pretrial voir dire selection questioning by defense and prosecution lawyers, which took several hours and consisted of over 300 questions. When she was finally called, after other potential jurors had been rejected, Kriho says the questioner asked simply, "You heard the questions. Is there anything you'd answer differently?" Kriho volunteered whatever information she thought would be relevant--that she had once sued a developer, for instance. She was not asked anything about her political activities with the Colorado Hemp Initiative Project, nor was there any reason to do so. The case being tried had nothing at all to do with hemp or even marijuana, involving instead a 19-year-old girl facing a long string of very heavy criminal charges for a very small amount of methamphetamine. Far from ever trying to "bias" her fellow jurors toward the defendant in their deliberations after both sides had rested, Kriho points out that they unanimously voted for conviction on the charges of "criminal impersonation" and possession of "drug paraphernalia." But Kriho was the holdout juror on the third charge--criminal possession of a Schedule I drug. Kriho felt there was not enough evidence to convict on that charge, and that the police hadn't shown probable cause to search for drugs or anything else. And though jury deliberations are supposed to be sacrosanct, prosecutors later produced evidence that Kriho had spoken aloud about the concept of jury nullification, under which individual jurors are entitled to overlook the written law and vote with their conscience. Ballistic On The Bench She also confessed to the other jurors that she thought it was a shame that the courts, not families, dealt nowadays with the sort of problems facing this teenage defendant. "These are the radical arguments that got me in trouble," Kriho says wryly. Indeed, when another juror sent an anonymous note to trial judge Kenneth Barnhill, asking about jury nullification, he instantly declared a mistrial, and county prosecutors instantly began investigating Laura Kriho personally. "That's not common," remarks Kriho's defense attorney, Paul Grant of Parker, CO. Judge Barnhill "never verified if one person had these concerns or twelve. He just blew up, lost his temper, and declared a mistrial. It's not the way a judge should handle something like that." Casting around for evidence to support contempt-of-court charges against Kriho (or at least to vilify her), county investigators uncovered her long association with COHIP, and even exhumed a 12-year-old LSD-possession charge against her, which had resulted in a deferred judgment and been officially expunged from her record--or so she'd been unreliably advised at the time. These matters, though they had nothing to do with methamphetamine, should have been divulged by her in voir dire, the state is now insisting. "Because she stood against conviction they investigated her," attorney Grant summarizes, "and decided there were things they would have liked to have known about her so they could have kept her off the jury." Based on these disclosures about Laura Kriho's lifelong personal attitudes to authority, and with details from within the jury room about the deliberations there (which the Appeals Court later ruled, quite sharply, were patently inadmissible as evidence against her), an official criminal charge was essentially made up special for Laura Kriho: "Contempt of Court For Obstructing The Administration Of Justice By Preventing The Selection Of A Fair And Impartial Jury." On this personally-tailored bill of attainder, as some have called it, Kriho was prosecuted last year before First District Judge Henry Nieto, who duly found her guilty and fined her $2,100. This was defrayed through COHIP's Jury Rights Project, which also helped underwrite her successful challenge to Nieto's decision before the State Court of Appeals, to the tune of over $25,000 so far. And although the state has already spent around ten times that much in fruitlessly prosecuting her, they're clearly prepared to write another blank check on the taxpayer's tab to get some sort of conviction on her eventually. Why The Fuss? "What Laura Kriho was punished for," diagnoses attorney Grant, "was essentially interfering with a conviction. Although they came up with some creative arguments to get around that, the truth still is Laura Kriho was prosecuted and convicted because she disrupted the conviction of a drug case." For Kriho, this explains the government's dog-with-a-bone persistence in keeping after her. "This wouldn't have happened if this weren't a drug case," she says. "It definitely shows how scared the government is that juries will refuse to convict defendants of nonviolent drug crimes." As for the prosecution's side of the matter, the District Attorney on the case, Jim Stanley, didn't return calls to HIGH TIMES. Jefferson County DA spokesperson Karen Russell maintains that filing for a re-hearing before the State Court of Appeals is a "routine" procedure, and that if it's turned down, the next stop is the State Supreme Court. Kriho, meanwhile, is continuing her activism. In early June, she spoke in support of the Colorado Hemp Initiative at the office of Secetary of State Vikki Buckley--who scuttled the last such referendum measure, after voters had already passed on it in November 1998, with backroom political tactics that were also ultimately found to be illegal by the state's highest courts. In a part of the country where law-enforcement officials are clearly fond of taking the law into their own hands, legally or howsoever, Laura Kriho is obviously destined to make an example, and go on making it for a good long time to come. To help Laura Kriho: Donate to her legal-defense fund. Send check or money order to: Jury Rights Project PO Box 729 Nederland, CO 80466 (303)-448-5640 You can also write a letter of complaint concerning Judge Henry Nieto, who convicted Kriho: Colorado Commission on Judicial Discipline 1301 Pennsylvania St. #260 Denver, CO 80203 (303) 837-3601 Honorable Henry Nieto 1st Judicial District Jefferson County Justice Center 100 Jefferson County Parkway Golden, CO 80401 The Jury Rights Project asks that you send them copies of your letters, for their records. Ande Nicholson with Dean Latimer - Special to HT News HIGH TIMES 235 Park Avenue South, 5th Floor New York, NY 10003 Web:www.hightimes.com Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Re-distributed by the: Jury Rights Project <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Old Web page: <http://www.lrt.org/jrp.homepage.htm> New Web page: <http://www.levellers.org/jrp> To be added to or removed from the JRP mailing list, send email with the word SUBSCRIBE or UNSUBSCRIBE in the title. The JRP is dedicated to: * educating jurors about their right to acquit people who have been accused of victmless crimes and thereby veto bad laws; * protecting jurors from judicial and prosecutorial tyranny; * educating citizens about the history and power of juries; * distributing current news related to jurors and juries ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let the next virus knock you out! 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