Out with the old, in with the new! Thanks to the help of graphic design wizard Meg McLain, NHJury.com has a brand new trifold for outreach to potential jurors and others who want to learn about the right of jury nullification!
5,000 new fliers have been printed and will be filtering to activists statewide this summer (after we run dry of the original 2011 flier).
The new version features updated text that reflects the passage of the NH Jury Nullification law in 2012 as well as a more current quote from a judge about nullification among other minor tweaks and a complete graphical redesign!
Hello and welcome to (or welcome back to) NHJury.com! You may be here because you were given an NHJury.com flier at a courthouse in New Hampshire. Here you will find further detail on the idea of jury nullification and your rights as a juror as well as information for defendants.
Until recently, this site had suffered from a lack of updates to the blog. I’ve now taken over managing the site and hope to bring more content here over time by adding more NH jury activists as bloggers. There has recently been a resurgence of jury outreach in Manchester. It would be great to have outreach happening regularly in all ten counties of NH. (Grafton and Cheshire counties have had consistent jury outreach for several years.) Want to help? Join our group on facebook and step up!
Some immediate changes to the site include some graphical tweaks, updates, and the addition of a Contact Us page. You can reach NHJury.com activists statewide via the contact form here or this email address: nhjury at googlegroups.com.
In an interesting article published at U.S. News, the United States Supreme Court decided that jurors, not judges, would decide if mandatory minimum sentencing would apply.
SCOTUS: Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences in Jury’s Hands
Many mandatory minimum sentences are imposed for drug offenses
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a jury, not a judge, should have the final say on facts that impose mandatory minimum sentences for criminals.
In particular, the 5-4 ruling will make it harder to impose minimum sentences on drug offenders, because they are among the most frequent to receive those sentences. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion. He was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
“Mandatory minimums for drug offenders will lessen, but it’s difficult to say to what extent,” says Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, which opposes mandatory minimum sentences. “It’s also likely that this will have beneficial effects in reducing racial disparity, because so many mandatory minimums are imposed for drug offenses, and because African-Americans in particular are on the receiving end of those penalties.”
Mark Schmidter is a free man after spending 104 days in the Orange County Jail. He was convicted late last year of indirect criminal contempt by Chief Judge Belvin Perry for handing out flyers at the Orange County Courthouse in the months leading up to and during the Casey Anthony trial. He says his fight over free speech is not over.
Those flyers explained the right of jurors to nullify convictions if they thought the law was wrong, even if a defendant had committed the crime. Schmidter says he will jump right back into the fray now that he has served his time.
To read the entire article, watch news report, click here.
Out with the old, in with the new! Thanks to the help of graphic design wizard Meg McLain, NHJury.com has a brand new trifold for outreach to potential jurors and others who want to learn about the right of jury nullification!
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