This is just about the saddest and most disgusting thing I have ever read. A self-described “neo-libertarian”* pulls Federal jury duty, gleefully and without qualms sentences somebody accused of being a dope smuggler to 10 years in prison, and then brags about it on his allegedly “free markets, free people” blog.
The Usual Suspects (Beck, Brown, Nikoley, Sabotta, Schneider) are there to set him straight, while a posse of pretenders strews their way with red herrings. And he totally doesn’t get it.
The pile-on reminds me of the Zumbo case, though Dale Franks has no money to lose here (pity he doesn’t work for MPP), and Zumbo finally did get it. It always hurts worse to be stabbed by our own. Somebody (Sabotta, I think; I can’t find it in three long threads of comments) more tellingly compared him to Bob Black. Anyway, he still hasn’t answered my question:
Don’t tell me about the law, or the proper circumstances under which to employ jury nullification, or anything at all involving the state. Were YOU morally justified in imprisoning this guy? If you’d done it with your own guns, instead of the State’s, would it have been a moral act?
Thanks to Beck.
*”Neo” in “neolibertarian”, like “neoconservative”, is a typo for “not”.
UPDATE: Hoo-wee! Republican blogger Franks strikes back, piling all the bodies of the drug war at Rhett’s feet, and calling his vote “retaliatory violence”. Funny how there’s all this violence and crime associated with illegal drugs, and none associated with legal drugs. You see CVS and Walgreen’s build across the street from each other, but nary a shootout. So, Dale, what’s the crucial difference between the two businesses? And what have you done lately to insure that difference is perpetuated?
The Quick and the Dead 
[…] the whole Dale Franks flail, it was Jeffrey Quick who cut to the heart of it, best. Go read his question, which lays unattended by the brave Franks, […]
Thank you, sir. I found your heading amusingly cryptic. “the Ron Paul of libertarian blogs”?
Not really libertarian, but close enough for government work? A Nazi-lover? (shame, Sabotta) The guy who should win but won’t? (certainly in the case of this question) The blog that always votes no? I could have fun all day with that. Or is that QandO that’s Ron Paul? In their case, I’m smelling the good-morning aroma of dextrinized wheat starch. Fork ’em; they’re done.
Good on ya, Jeff..
and I’m still waiting to see if someone can adequately answer what i thought was a thoroughly respectable question in this thread:
http://www.qando.net/comments.aspx?Entry=7653
Ron
[…] Libertarian fight! […]
This ‘un, Ron?:
“How could you?” is what your mother says when she’s mad. He “could” do the act because it was the easiest thing to do under the circumstances. Unfortunately, for it to be easiest, we have to posit an individual with no conscience at all…which comports with the defense he’s made. And the calling Godwin on the Nazi comparison is just bullshit…Franks was “chust followink orders”. So is a libertarian without a conscience a libertarian? Or even human?
Welcome Yet Another Republican Blog to the world!
I thought Q&O was a straight Republican blog from the first day I wandered over there. No one can spend so much time defending the mess in Iraq unless they believe in the Bush program whole heartedly.
I don’t think the AnCap ideal is realistic–even if it came true, all those litigation bureaus and security companies would really just be government by another name–but that doesn’t excuse anyone from supporting everything government does.
“Here I stand”–God, or at least circumstances, impose the place on you, but it’s still your responsibility to make a stand. Franks did not, and then finds himself forced to abandon the principles he supposedly defends just for the sake of making himself seem still principled.
As for Franks’ new defense–by that logic, you can tar anyone with anything if you want. Last month, when I was in the hospital [pelvic fracture–I get to hop around like a one legged rabbit for the next two months], the guy in the next bed was, I am pretty sure, an illegal immigrant–a migrant farm worker injured somehow down in Homestead, a Guatemalan who spoke no English at all, and whose only family in the US was a cousin who turned to have no ID when he came to pick him up at the hospital. Since I made absolutely no attempt to turn to him into ICE, I therefore am (according to Franks) an active supporter of illegal immigration, smuggling, and terrorist infiltration of US borders, aren’t I?
There is one defense he could have made–that he was called as a juror to decide if Rhett did in fact violate the laws as they stand, and as a juror that was all he was supposed to do, without regard for his own personal views on whether the law should have been a law in the first place. That kind of throws out jury nullification on its ear, but I think that could be a valid argument. But instead he’s defending the prohibitions and the government…..sigh.
“Last month, when I was in the hospital ..”
Sorry to hear it; I was wondering why you hadn’t been around here of late. That whole chunk of your body is messed up, isn’t it? Maybe you need an ass transplant…we can use Dale Franks.
I’m not sure AnCapistan is realistic either, but we can decide when we get there.
Re the jurobot defense: yeah, he could, but he didn’t. There’s stuff in there where he supports the JN idea. And really, that wouldn’t end the moral problem at all. If his position were really “I must decide according to judge’s instructions, even if the law is totally bogus” (which it’s clearly not, esp. after the new post), he needed to make that clear to the judge beforehand. Since there’s no penalty for being excused from a jury pool, playing the Eichmann defense (which your idea is just a more sophisticated version of) isn’t going to fly.
As is every soldier, every worker who does his job, and every normal, decent citizen who has ever obeyed any orders from anyone on any subject. Are you seriously arguing that following a judge’s instructions to enforce a U.S. customs law (whose constitutionality is not even in doubt) is remotely analogous to “just following orders” to exterminate Jews by the millions?
The principle is the same: that otherwise decent people who know better toss their consciences to please authority. And Franks, doing the blog he was with the people he was, knew better; if he did not, it would scarcely be worth comment, as our fellow citizens put away druggies on a daily basis. Yes, one guy losing ten years of his life is less severe than many losing all of their life. But that’s also rather irrelevant; are you seriously arguing that a Jew sprung from slave labor in a camp after 4 years is less put-upon than Rhett after 10 years? After a man has been incarcerated, everything about his state is more or less unpleasant detail, further indignities and injustices to the main point.
As for customs law, I have no reason to believe that Franks would have chosen differently had the truck been interdicted between states. The law itself may be constitutional, but it exists solely to support a 9th and 10th Amendment violation, one that Franks has since come out in full favor of, thus forfeiting any right to a defense of his action based on constitutionality.
The principle is not the same, nor even close. Nuremberg does not stand for the idea that everyone gets to ignore every law they don’t like. It stands for the much narrower principle that while we should all generally obey the law, there are extreme, egregious situations – crimes against humanity – where we should not. Mass genocide clearly meets that criterion. Enforcing paternalistic drug laws does not. To equate the two is, in effect, to equate innocent Jews with drug pushers.
I don’t know, nor frankly care, how Franks would have handled an interstate or even intrastate violation. For one thing, the only issue before us is the case he did blog about, not anyone’s wild imaginations about a different case he may or may not have blogged about – and which would likely have implicated other issues (e.g., unreasonable search and seizure) if he had. I think your Ninth Amendment argument is a stretch, but do agree that federal prohibitions against purely intrastate possession (or arguably even purely intrastate commerce) in drugs violate the 10th Amendment. No matter, though, it’s not the jury’s job to decide whether a statute is constitutional or not, and besides, state law mandates the same result.
Lastly, I’m a bit unclear as to what you would have had Franks do in the situation. Should he have lied and told the judge he could uphold the law, knowing full well he could not? Or should he have admitted upfront that he thinks drug laws are bad, refuses to enforce them against anyone, and easily get tossed from the case, thereby leaving him to be tried by 12 non-libertarians? The former option would have made him a perjurer. The latter – the extent that doing his civic duty made him a Nazi war criminal in your twisted world – would have made him a modern day Pontius Pilate.
Better a Pilate than a Caiaphas. Actually, either action would have been honorable in my book. There are probably ways that one could have parsed “uphold the law” that would not involve lying, though they’d probably get him voir dired. The 2nd option would be safer for Franks, and thus generally preferable. Personally, I don’t understand your objection to being “tried by 12 non-libertarians” because in effect that’s exactly what happened, as there’s no evidence in the story to suggest that any juror’s action was influenced by libertarian principle. Thus, if Franks had been excluded from the jury, the result would have been the same. If, as a rule, people did so, it might have an effect on the drug war.
As I indicated above, I’m not so concerned about what Franks did as a juror (I’m not Rhett, after all) than as a blogger.
No one said having a libertarian (a law-abiding one, anyway) on the jury guarantees an acquittal or even a mistrial. It does, however, guarantee that at least one guy on the jury will really want the defendant to be acquitted, and will therefore be more sympathetic to just about anything that can construed as reasonable doubt.
Or all libertarians can become too good for the jury system as we know it, and ensure that every accused drug dealer gets “fairly” judged by 12 ardent supporters of the drug war. Your call.
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