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They Disrobe Judges, Don't They?
by L. Neil Smith
[email protected]

Attribute to L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Belvin Perry, a judge of some kind in the city of Orlando, county of Orange, state of utter and complete lunacy. Belvin not only thinks he knows more about the law than the average individual—which is almost certainly not true these days—but the Founding Fathers, who wrote the law in the first place, as well.

To all appearances, that's why he cited two fellows named Mark Schmidter and Julian Heiklen for contempt of court when they refused to bow to his illegal decree not to exercise their First Amendment rights on the public plaza outside the petty dictatorship he calls a courtroom.

Heiklen got 155 days—more than five months—for distributing literature about jury nullification to passersby, and Schmidter is expected to get about the same. What is not expected is anything resembling due process. Under these circumstances there is no jury, just a nasty piece of work on the bench who apparently hates the idea of a free people governing themselves.

You can see this pompous self-important little man—the kind who can strut sitting down—on the video linked to below. Unfortunately, he is typical of the rot that presently infects the courts of what was once the freest country in the world. If there's no kangaroo in his family crest, there should be.

Not surprisingly, Orlando is rated as the third most dangerous city in the United States. And why shouldn't it be, when the judges, bailiffs, and jailers—presumed dispensers of law and order—are busy illegally prosecuting individuals for publicly expressing their opinion?

I know that as a short, bald, fat guy with a really stupid name, Belvin has a lot to compensate for. His life was probably hell in grade school. But why, I ask, take it out on the honest and lawful proponents of a legal concept that was ancient when this country was born, and highly thought of by both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson?

Not to mention various and assorted other Tea Partiers, crackpots, anti-government radicals, and potential domestic terrorists like John Adams, Sir William Blackstone, Justice Samuel Chase, Clarence Darrow, Lord Thomas Denman, Sir Mathew Hale, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Judge Learned Hand, Justice Robert H. Jackson, John Jay, William Kunstler, John Locke, Justice Thurgood Marshall, Massachusetts Justice Theophilus Parsons, Lysander Spooner, Sir John Vaughn, and Justice Byron White.

Then there are the fly-by-night institutions: the Arizona Supreme Court, for one, the Constitution of the State of Maryland, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals, Scheflin and Van Dyke, the Indiana State Constitution, the Yale Law Journal, and the United States Supreme Court.

See: http://www.levellers.org/jrp/orig/jrp.jurquotes.htm

I'd love to give my readers this clown's publicly-available phone number and office address. Perhaps they could help explain to him why he's being considered for our coveted White Wig Award for judicial behavior consistent with that of the English judges whose insane, evil, and mentally incompetent rulings helped to spark the American Revolution. But the last time we did something like that, the United States Marshals Service, no less, another completely unlawful operation on the part of a runaway super-state (see Article I, Section VIII of the United States Constitution and show me where it authorizes a federal secret police force), threatened to shut The Libertarian Enterprise down.

Instead, please allow me to introduce you to "A Juror's Creed", something I put together about a decade ago, and ask you to spread it around, as widely as you possibly can. The more of us who are aware of a jury's ancient prerogatives, the less hold tyranny has on any one of us.

"As an American juror, I promise to exercise my 1000-year-old right and duty to arrive at a verdict, not merely on the basis of the facts of a particular case, or any instructions that I may be given, but through my ability to reason, my knowledge of the Bill of Rights, and my individual conscience; when needful, I will judge the law itself."

The law, in effect, is what a jury says it is—a very American idea. Juries didn't much like alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s and they refused to convict about 60 percent of those accused of breaking the law, until the government, in order to save face, was forced to repeal what had been an idiotic law. That's why the government, since September 11, 2001, has been careful to evade due process wherever it can, with its renditions and Guantanamo, and every other totalitarian tactic they can think of. As with any two-penny tinpot tyranny, due process gets in the way of kidnapping and torturing their perceived enemies.

The sad, stupid case of the pudgy judge in Orlando—this tubby little strutter—is only a single example in a long, long line of poor, deluded creatures, reaching back into the Stone Age, who have believed they can run your life better than you can, and are willing to kill you and cook you and eat you just to prove it. That attitude is a disease which I hope and trust the next few years will finally cure.

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