Malheur Jury Rejects the Thought Police
by Shari Dovale
Thursday’s verdict in the Malheur Protest Trial sent a resounding message to everyone that the citizen’s reject the over reaching tyranny of Federal government.
The trial judge, Anna Brown, and the prosecutors repeatedly told jurors that crimes did not have to take place. All they were to determine is if the defendants had held a conversation about committing a crime.
Straight out of George Orwell’s 1984.
You no longer have to actually commit a crime, you just have to think about it, and maybe discuss it with someone, to be charged.
The trial had been stacked against the defendants from the beginning. The judge repeatedly ruled against them, beginning during jury selection. Allowing people into the jury pool that had obvious ties to the prosecution and rejecting anyone that might be sympathetic to the defense.
One juror was seated that had been a former employee of the very organization that was central to the charges in this case. Judge Anna Brown denied the requests of defense to remove the former BLM employee for bias stating that she felt he could be impartial. That decision came back to haunt her this week when the jury questioned this man’s bias in a inquiry to the court.
Can a juror, a former employee of the Bureau of Land Management, who opens their remarks in deliberations by stating ‘I am very biased …’ be considered an impartial judge in this case?
Brown made every attempt to keep this man on the jury before Marcus Mumford filed a motion addressing that very point. Brown was forced to replace him with an alternate juror.
When the deliberations began again on Thursday, it only took about 5 hours for the unanimous verdicts of Not Guilty to be announced. The jury rejected the government’s plan to hold people accountable for their perceived thoughts without ever actually committing a crime.
The jury must have seen the dangerous precedent this would have set for our country. No one wants to be charged for crimes they did not commit, but it is even worse to be charged for crimes that the government admits did not happen.
The repeated statements throughout the trial that this case was not about committing crimes but only about talking about it, was as scary to the jury as it was to the rest of the Nation.
Truth and Justice prevailed this week in Portland! The US Constitution triumphed!
The Federal government was sent a very clear message from ‘We The People.’