Jury selected for gun rights advocate's homicide trial

http://www.jsonline.com/blogs/news/132491203.html

Vielmetti - EXCERPT said:

His trial began with jury selection Monday before Circuit Judge Richard Sankovitz. Two men, African Americans from Milwaukee, said they owned hand guns which they kept at home for protection. Neither of them were selected to the jury of eight men and five women who will hear the case. Also struck were two peoplea who knew homicide victims, one whose nephew is charged with shooting his girlfriend, a man who said a friend had been run over by a police officer in Los Angeles, and a woman who was on a prior jury that acquitted the defendant in an attempted homicide case. No potential jurors said they felt strongly about the current gun rights debates one way or the other, or belonged to any gun rights or gun control advocacy groups.

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So much for a jury of your peers. Let's dump all gun owners from the jury. Sheesh.

TyGuy said:

So much for a jury of your peers. Let's dump all gun owners from the jury. Sheesh.

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I don't want a jury of my peers. I want an impartial jury as stated under the Sixth Amendment.

I would want a jury of my peers to include pro-gunners, or at least gun owners, stricken only if their guns were nicer than mine.

For those that forgot history - a "jury of one's peers" was a jury of lords enpaneled to hear a criminal charge against another lord, as opposed to having commoners sit on the jury. Yes, that meaning of the word "peer" as opposed to what we commonly think of these days.

It was an attempt (feeble and highly flawed) to obtain an impartial jury, based on the presumption that because the lords (peers) trampled over the rights of the commoners the commoners would retaliate when they held power by sitting on a jury.

The problem is not that gunnies got weeded out of the jury pool, as they are known to be biased. The problem (actually two of them) is that antis are not weeded out of the jury pool and that most folks who can both be impartial and are bright enough to see through the propaganda of both the prosecution and defense and concentrate on applying facts to law try with all their might to get out of jury duty.

stay safe.