If abortion is illegal, jury nullification should be used.

[bluestateguy]

If your state criminalizes abortion the law will have to be enforced. If people, even just a few people, are unwilling to convict a woman or her doctor for the "crime" of abortion then the law becomes unenforceable, and law enforcement agencies will eventually give up, or make enforcement a secondary priority.

So if they put you on a jury in one of these cases, you just refuse to convict, regardless of the facts and the evidence. Then the woman and her doctor get an acquittal or a hung jury, and they walk.

It happened a few times when abortion was illegal: a few jurors just could not be convinced that the defendant did anything wrong.

Jury nullification is democratic and it goes to the heart of our basic rights as citizens.

[BOSSHOG]

1. And in keeping with "conservative" ethics

refuse to be sworn in using republican "leadership" as a precedent and if you get in a bind - LIE!

[fasttense]

2. Well, when abortion was illegal, that is similar to what actually happened

"Illegal abortionists were thriving. Criminologists found that abortion had become the third most lucrative criminal enterprise in the United States, surpassed only by gambling and narcotics. One investigator determined that some expert abortionists were performing as many as forty-five abortions a day and between four and five thousand abortions a year.

"A 1963 law review article noted that "our nation's abortion laws have admittedly kept legal abortions to a minimum, just as the eighteenth amendment virtually eliminated the legal consumption of liquor." Nevertheless, the author continued, "the abortion enactment have been no more successful in preventing abortion than the eighteenth amendment was in eradicating drinking." "

"Lacking cooperative witnesses and complainants, law enforcement agents could not easily shut down known practitioners of criminal abortion.

"The few prosecutions that were instituted faced jurors unwilling to convict abortionists and judges unwilling to impose severe sentences."

"Anti-abortion advocates complained that "even the most outrageous abortionist" could not be convicted in a jury trial."

One juror refused to convict a well-known abortionist because there was "nobody in Schuykill County that the doctor hasn't helped."


"Half the abortionists convicted in New York between 1925 and 1950 were sentenced only to probation. Dr. Milan Vuitch, a prominent physician-abortionist, was arrested sixteen times for openly running an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. but never went to jail."

"Even abortionists convicted and sentenced to prison at trial often escaped legal sanction. Some appellate judges placed extraordinarily high burden of proof on the state to establish that insufficient medical grounds existed for the abortion.

"Some executives used clemency to keep abortionists on the street. A New York campaign against illegal abortion during the first decade of the twentieth century came to a dismal conclusion when the only three abortionists convicted were immediately pardoned by the governor."

"A University of Texas law professor recalls being told by Justice Powell that Roe "provided opportunities for the less affluent to enjoy the rights their more affluent sisters were already exercising." "

"Although pro-life activists repeatedly denounce Roe for promoting the slaughter of the unborn, actual abortion rates increased only slightly after legalization."

http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/book-sum/rethink.html