Colorado To Jurors: We Own Your Mind!*
FROM HIGH TIMES/FILED 06/18/99
DENVER, CO--The Colorado prosecutors who have helped hemp activist Laura
Kriho make "jury nullification" a household word across America have not
tired in their crusade. Although the state Court of Appeals last April
cleared Kriho of criminal charges for voicing her political opinions in a
jury room in 1996, the state government itself is now filing for a
re-hearing of the case.
Kriho's qualms about consigning a teenager to a long stretch in prison for
personal-quantity drug possession, and her attempt to articulate them to
the other jurors on the case, did indeed constitute "contempt of court,"
the state itself is now charging. They're insisting that the Appeals
justices reverse their reasoning and find Kriho guilty after all--thus
keeping the concept of jury nullification foursquare before the public's
attention, at no greater cost than a small Rocky Mountain of taxpayer
dollars (so far), and about $25,000 that Kriho has had to put up to defend
herself.
Heresy In The Court!
Ironically, Laura Kriho tried to get out of jury duty on that fateful 1996
day, telling a secretary she would have to hitchhike down to the Gilpin
County courthouse from her mountain home, but she was told she had to be
there. She later found out that she might've been charged $500 with a
remote chance of serving jail time if she hadn't shown up. Instead, Kriho
wound up fined $1,200 for the contempt-of-court charge, and being dragged
back to court again and again and again, for three years and counting.
As an alternate-juror candidate, Kriho wasn't even in the jury box during
the pretrial voir dire selection questioning by defense and prosecution
lawyers, which took several hours and consisted of over 300 questions. When
she was finally called, after other potential jurors had been rejected,
Kriho says the questioner asked simply, "You heard the questions. Is there
anything you'd answer differently?" Kriho volunteered whatever information
she thought would be relevant--that she had once sued a developer, for
instance. She was not asked about her political activities with
the Colorado Hemp Initiative Project (COHIP), nor was there any reason to do so.
The case being tried had nothing at all to do with hemp or even marijuana,
involving instead a 19-year-old girl facing a long string of very heavy
criminal charges for a very small amount of methamphetamine. Far from ever
trying to "bias" her fellow jurors toward the defendant in their
deliberations after both sides had rested, Kriho points out that they
unanimously voted for conviction on the charges of "criminal impersonation"
and possession of "drug paraphernalia."
But Kriho was the holdout juror on the third charge--criminal possession of
a Schedule I drug. Kriho felt there was not enough evidence to convict on
that charge, and that the police hadn't shown probable cause to search for
drugs or anything else. And though jury deliberations are supposed to be
sacrosanct, prosecutors later produced evidence that Kriho had spoken aloud
about the concept of jury nullification, under which individual jurors are
entitled to overlook the written law and vote with their conscience.
Ballistic On The Bench
She also confessed to the other jurors that she thought it was a shame that
the courts, not families, dealt nowadays with the sort of problems facing
this teenage defendant. "These are the radical arguments that got me in
trouble," Kriho says wryly. Indeed, when another juror sent an anonymous
note to trial judge Kenneth Barnhill, asking about jury nullification, he
instantly declared a mistrial, and county prosecutors began investigating Laura Kriho personally.
"That's not common," remarks Kriho's defense attorney, Paul Grant of
Parker, CO. “Judge Barnhill never verified if one person had these concerns
or twelve. He just blew up, lost his temper, and declared a mistrial. It's
not the way a judge should handle something like that."
Casting around for evidence to support contempt-of-court charges against
Kriho (or at least to vilify her), county investigators uncovered her long
association with COHIP, and even exhumed a 12-year-old LSD-possession
charge against her, which had resulted in a deferred judgment and been
officially expunged from her record--or so she'd been unreliably advised at
the time. These matters, though they had nothing to do with
methamphetamine, should have been divulged by her in voir dire, the state
is now insisting. "Because she stood against conviction they investigated
her," attorney Grant summarizes, "and decided there were things they would
have liked to have known about her so they could have kept her off the
jury."
Based on these disclosures about Laura Kriho's lifelong personal attitudes
to authority, and with details from within the jury room about the
deliberations there (which the Appeals Court later ruled, quite sharply,
were patently inadmissible as evidence against her), an official criminal
charge was essentially made up special for Laura Kriho: "Contempt of Court
For Obstructing The Administration Of Justice By Preventing The Selection
Of A Fair And Impartial Jury."
On this personally-tailored bill of attainder, as some have called it,
Kriho was prosecuted last year before First District Judge Henry Nieto, who
duly found her guilty and fined her $2,100. This was defrayed through
COHIP's Jury Rights Project, which also helped underwrite her successful
challenge to Nieto's decision before the State Court of Appeals, to the
tune of over $25,000 so far. And although the state has already spent
around ten times that much in fruitlessly prosecuting her, they're clearly
prepared to write another blank check on the taxpayer's tab to get some
sort of conviction on her eventually.
Why The Fuss?
"What Laura Kriho was punished for," diagnoses attorney Grant, "was
essentially interfering with a conviction. Although they came up with some
creative arguments to get around that, the truth still is Laura Kriho was
prosecuted and convicted because she disrupted the conviction of a drug
case."
For Kriho, this explains the government's dog-with-a-bone persistence in
keeping after her. "This wouldn't have happened if this weren't a drug
case," she says. "It definitely shows how scared the government is that
juries will refuse to convict defendants of nonviolent drug crimes."
As for the prosecution's side of the matter, the District Attorney on the
case, Jim Stanley, didn't return calls to HIGH TIMES. Jefferson County DA
spokesperson Karen Russell maintains that filing for a re-hearing before
the State Court of Appeals is a routine procedure, and that if it's
turned down, the next stop is the State Supreme Court.
Kriho, meanwhile, is continuing her activism. In early June, she spoke in
support of the Colorado Hemp Initiative at the office of Secretary of State
Vikki Buckley--who scuttled the last such referendum measure, after voters
had already passed on it in November 1998, with back-room political tactics
that were also ultimately found to be illegal by the state's highest
courts. In a part of the country where law-enforcement officials are
clearly fond of taking the law into their own hands, legally or howsoever,
Laura Kriho is obviously destined to make an example, and go on making it
for a good long time to come.
Ande Wanderer with Dean Latimer - Special to HT News
(* This was originally a straight-up new story, this version is ‘High Timesified’.)
