hwybear wrote:Guess your not following this too closely....this practice has also been done by the Windsor Police, Thunder Bay Police.
And it is not jury rigging at all. An example of that would be putting people on the jury who have all had someone killed by an impaired driver in a impaired driving causing death case.
To my understanding is the crown was trying to get jurors that had a completely clean background...imagine that. But defence wants anyone, including criminals to be jurors.
Apparently No sense trying to fight the whiny sniffling downturn of canadian society where criminals have all the rights and victims zero! Everyone jumps on the help the criminal band wagon!
My understanding of the "law" is that doing detailed background checks on potential jurors is 100% illegal. It's not bending the law...it's breaking the law. People have the right to privacy.
If this wasn't blatantly breaking the law, then the Attorney General wouldn't have done squat about it....and he immediately stopped the practice. Although, I'd assume the practice was totally promoted internally until the media got ahold of the story.
They're allowed to cite a criminal record legally and that's it. But the media got access to the notes that were given to the Crown by the OPP and things like "doesn't like Police" were written beside names.....WTF???....what kind of check did they do to come to that conclusion?
So the system was trying to buck it's own system....and to me, that's a conscious attempt to stack a jury.
If I'm up on trial in front of a jury of my peers, I want a balanced jury. And to get a balanced jury you need folks who might just question the tact of law enforcement and not just take their word for it. Cause if my future hangs in the balance, I want everyone on that jury to question everything.....not just folks who represent the June Cleaver's of yesteryear
