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| Welcome back. | |
| Now, this election that comes up in less than a week, there are three states that have a marijuana ballot initiative on them. | |
| Colorado, Oregon, and Washington State all have initiatives. | |
| This is something that affects everybody. | |
| Now, there's an issue of prohibition. | |
| If you remember back to alcohol prohibition, prohibition corrupts the government. | |
| Prohibition creates violence, and that's what we're seeing in all aspects of the drug war. | |
| The other thing is that we have a tremendous jail population. | |
| Here in the United States, we only have 5% of the population of the world, and yet we have 25% of the world's prison population. | |
| And most of that is due to the war on drugs. | |
| As a matter of fact, violent criminals, murderers, are let out frequently because they don't have enough jail space to keep them in when they have mandatory minimums for non-violent offenders using marijuana. | |
| The other way that it affects you is that even if you are not one of the people or somebody in your family is not someone who goes to jail with these laws. | |
| You're going to be paying for it. | |
| You're going to be paying up to $50,000 a year to keep these people in jail. | |
| Well, tonight on the show, we've got New Jersey weed man, Ed Fortune. | |
| He's a long-time activist, actually a political candidate, and he's been a victim of this illegal war on drugs. | |
| And he's fought it, and he's won an important victory. | |
| It involves something that's very important to all of us, jury nullification. | |
| Kind of get us up to date as to what's been going on with your case. | |
| While I was visiting New Jersey from California and I got pulled over by a New Jersey State Trooper and my luggage was a pound of my medicine, my marijuana. | |
| And I was charged with possession with intent to distribute and from the very beginning I said I was taking it all the way to a jury trial and I was invoking a jury nullification defense. | |
| The first trial in May of 2012, I got a hung jury. | |
| The prosecution elected to retry me again, and we just had that trial in October 2012, and I got a 12-0 verdict of not guilty. | |
| The first trial was a 7-5 hung jury, and so I really felt really vindicated when I got the 12-0 not guilty. | |
| You've been an activist for Feature for quite a while, haven't you? | |
| Yes, for at least 15 years. | |
| I think I first started openly talking about jury nullification in the 90s. | |
| I had a trial back in 2000. | |
| I went well into the third day of trial and then I succumbed to a really lenient plea offer also. | |
| I was facing 20 years that time and right in the middle of my trial, you know, I had a One juror started crying and saying she couldn't put me in prison and another juror was shaking her head every time I talked and the prosecution realized that I was going to get a hung jury that time and offered me a plea deal that I took and I always regretted it and I said if I was ever in that situation again that I wouldn't take a plea ever again. | |
| I've known for a long time that I don't care where you go, if you get 12 people and you get to argue that the law is wrong and not you, then you're going to get someone on the jury who believes that. | |
| We all know what the statistics are. | |
| At this point it's over 50% of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal. | |
| So if you can get to argue before a jury of 12 people, chances are you're going to get at least 6 of them. | |
| You know, like I said, the first time I went to trial I got 7-5. | |
| This last time I got 12-0. | |
| But I think this message about jury nullification and arguing to the jury that the law was wrong and not you, to say you didn't do anything wrong, like admit to everything and then say you didn't do anything wrong. | |
| And I believe that that's the key to our success. | |
| We can win. | |
| We can win this. | |
| Juries were designed for people who founded this country. | |
| They realized that citizens needed to watch each other's back. | |
| And there's all kinds of quotes from Patrick Henry and other people. | |
| I mean, this is not anything new. | |
| It's something that's been taken away from us for some time. | |
| And a lot of Americans don't realize that we've always had this as a legal, traditional way to secure each other's liberties. | |
| A lot of people don't realize that because of the lying and the intimidation that's done by judges and the court system towards jurors and towards defendants. | |
| You know, they offer the carrot of plea bargaining to the defendants and then they Uh, they lie to the jurors and tell them that they have to judge the facts, that they can't think about the case, and then they intimidate lawyers who want to try to use that as a defense. | |
| But, now in your case, did you act as your own lawyer, or did you find a lawyer that would speak up about that? | |
| No. | |
| That's a hard thing to find a lawyer who will argue nullification. | |
| So I had to represent myself. | |
| I was forced to represent myself because of that. | |
| Because no lawyer is going to argue that. | |
| That's right. | |
| That's right. | |
| Well now, I don't know if you're aware of it, but New Hampshire has just passed a law earlier this year where a judge cannot punish a lawyer for telling the jury that they can judge the law as well as the facts of the case. | |
| So that's moving it towards that way, but the amazing thing is that in many, many states, it's written in the state constitution that the function of jurors is to judge not just the facts of the case, but to judge the law. | |
| Yes, you know, I think that was the greatest tactic in my trial. | |
| The fact that all I did was I wrote New Jersey Constitution, Article 1, Paragraph 6, on a big poster board. | |
| And I put it right in front of the jurors, and I read it. | |
| And the first trial, the judge tried to stop me. | |
| We had an open argument in front of the jury. | |
| And then he allowed me to read it because I was like, why can't I read the Constitution to the jurors? | |
| He allowed me to read it, but when I tried to repeat it two or three times, he wouldn't let me do it. | |
| The second trial, not only did I read it, I kept referring to it, and I left it sitting right there in front of him the entire three days of the trial. | |
| That poster sat right in front of him. | |
| And I'll tell you what New Jersey Constitution Article 1, Paragraph 6 says. | |
| It says, in all prosecutions or indictments, and that's what I was doing, I was being, I was indicted and I was being prosecuted. | |
| So it says, in all indictments or prosecutions, the truth may be given as evidence to the jurors and the jury may determine the law as well as the facts. | |
| And that's the case I was putting on. | |
| That if a jury has a right to determine the law as well as the facts, then I'm arguing the law is wrong, not I. I didn't do anything. | |
| What I told the jury was I felt like I was the victim. | |
| And during the voyeur, the questioning of the jury before they were picked, several of them expressed their misgivings about the war on drugs. | |
| There were a couple questions that were asked specifically about marijuana. | |
| You know, the prosecutor would have used up all of his challenges in the first 15 people if he was allowed to. | |
| So what happened was he got overwhelmed. | |
| He didn't have enough challenges to get rid of all the people that had positive opinions or opinions similar to mine. | |
| I have a bone cancer condition. | |
| That the law that I was being prosecuted under didn't allow at all. | |
| There was no medical exemptions to our criminal statutes in New Jersey. | |
| So just the fact that I was able to talk about my personal medical problems and how I use marijuana despite the law. | |
| I basically said I disregarded the law all the time. | |
| I really appreciate you talking to us. | |
| We're out of time. | |
| Whether it's elections, or whether it's jury nullification, or whether it's speaking out when you're unjustly singled out. | |
| And there are ways, besides elections, that we can keep our freedoms. | |
| That's it for our show tonight. |
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