Buncombe County Superior Court Judge Tommy Davis instructed the jury not to consider the constitutionality of the charges against Coit and Bliss and denied their motion for dismissal on First Amendment grounds.
“In your opening statements you seemed to imply to the jury that they were going to decide whether or not their constitutional rights were violated,” the judge told the defendants, according to the Citizen Times. “They are not going to decide that. I am going to decide that.”
It looks like a good ground for appeal. A judge making a decision in a jury trial.
Jury nullification is completely valid and exactly what should have happened here.
Prosecutor Robert McRight repeatedly mocked the defendants, aspersing their journalism and political views, and suggesting that they are anti-American.
“We have apple pie, baseball, and people hating the government,” he quipped, according to the Citizen Times.
I mean, that’s straight-up red panic-style BS right there. The article seems to insinuate that was said in court, but doesn’t state so directly. If it was said in court, that’s not a legal argument and should not have been allowed to pass in the first place. But even if it was simply quipped in a press release or similar, it’s an absurd and shameful bit of rhetoric for any legal professional, much less a prosecutor, to be spouting.
What’s worse than all that is that it worked. Despite what the body cam footage showed, despite the prosecutor’s unprofessional manner, despite all the BS in the case, the jury still found that the prosecution had proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
It’s getting scarier and scarier out here every day.
Fascists and wannabe authoritarians are being emboldened every day. It’s partially the fault of everyone else and their apathy and complacency surrounding them.
I’ve begun taking a new approach where I don’t even bother entertaining these authoritarian talking points as I’ve seen them for what they are “an attempt at a gotcha argument disguised as a reasonable debate.” Nowadays I just straight up point out that the person is arguing in bad faith and connecting their talking points to the methodology of authoritarian camp propaganda, trolls, and ultranationalist sentiment.
This is ridiculous. The freedom of the press and speech are our most important freedoms…otherwise, hope would we know when the tyrants are coming? (I mean… monitoring the tyrants anyway…)
Edit: typo
We’ve been living in a police state for years, this shit is out of control.
Welcome to Fascism folks.
