DMN Letter, I-45 Speep Trap, Jury Nullification- Sunday Roundup

Jury Nullification-I wrote a piece for a local news outlet on jury nullification. I’ll post a link when it runs.

Here is the short version-
JN is the power of juries to acquit to prevent injustice. JN allows juries to determine if a law should apply or be enforced.
Judges and prosecutors who feel threatened by JN should realize that fighting injustice is the ultimate reasonable doubt. Why would a prosecutor not want juries to acquit to fight injustice?

If a prosecutor is seeking convictions, and not justice, then jurors have the right and the duty to return a not guilty verdict.

Finally, JN recognizes that Texas laws are not perfect. Therefore they should not be enforced for every violation.

I-45 Speed Trap

I live in Ennis and spend a lot of time driving up Interstate 45 to Dallas. There is hardly a worse speed trap in Dallas than I-45 South of 20. I hate watching these local cops harass motorists. The Ferris and Palmer police seemingly have no purpose beyond raising ticket revenue.

I want to do some open records work to exploit this nonsense. However, I am unsure of what to ask for? Merely asking for a copy of tickets won’t help. I doubt a written policy exists that states “write more ticket we need the money” etc. Any ideas?

DMN Letter
The Dallas Morning News Published a letter I submitted. It is a heavily edited version of the recent entry on the Editorial Board’s Drug War Formula. I was hoping they would publish my immigration letter also, but that hasn’t happened yet.

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One response to “DMN Letter, I-45 Speep Trap, Jury Nullification- Sunday Roundup”

  1. EdinTally says:

    Long shot (probably anecdotal at best): FOIA officer evaluations, correlate them with ticket output, try to find a pattern.

    My dept. had no policy but the Chief would comment if your ticket production went down. I’ve known other depts. where your production was directly related to if the dept could pay you.

    Smoking gun will be hard to find. good luck

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