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Either The Post Millennial is providing a skewed version of events, or a defense attorney just defeated Andy Ngo's civil case against two of his attackers through blatant juror intimidation. I tend to assume the media takes things out of context, especially openly partisan media, but it's hard for me to believe that a lawyer wearing an "I am Antifa" t-shirt every day in court, rather than formal attire, is anything other than a breach of protocol. Maybe the "I will remember all your faces" line was taken out of context, and she was just talking about her photographic memory. Maybe the Post Millennial was exaggerating when they said that the arguments were all ad hominem attacks. Or maybe this really is as bad as it seems.
Regardless, I'm surprised that the Motte isn't talking about the case.
Why would it be a surprise that a Portland jury acquitted antifa types? Next you'll tell me you were shocked when a jury of black women acquitted OJ Simpson of killing his white wife. Jury trials inherently limit justice to things that the median jury-selected resident of the locale in question considers criminal behavior. Your average Portlander probably does not consider beating up right-wing activists to be criminal. When some BLM activists tore down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston, captured on video, they might have known they'd be acquitted by a jury in the left-wing city of Bristol.
In the end, jury trials are impossible in fractured societies. We already have extensive data on this, see here from the UK:
The same is obviously true for political ideology and worldview. In India, jury trials were famously abolished after a naval commander killed his wife's lover, and was acquitted 8-1 for murder. In Malaysia, they were abolished after the government got worried that a 'witch doctor' who killed and dismembered a politician who had sought her advice might go free.
Conservatives often defend jury nullification, so can't be shocked when it's used against them. You either have a law that's vibes-based, in which jurors decide whether they feel like someone has done something wrong, or you have a law that's fact based, in which professionals determine whether somebody committed a crime. Mixing the two is a recipe for problems, often even in homogenous societies, but especially in diverse ones.
Apropos of nothing, but John Hacker was previously found not guilty in a bench trial for criminal charges of robbery in a fact pattern that... I'm very hard-pressed to believe wasn't clearly guilty.
Which rather broadens the scope of the problem beyond that presented in your criticism, here. I've got an old post about the boxes of liberty, and it doesn't look much better when paralleled to Oregon state or Portland city politics.
As is true of most states, in Oregon to convict a defendant of any theft offense, including robbery, the People must prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant intended to permanently deprive the victim of property. See State v. Pusztai, 348 P. 3d 241 (Or: Court of Appeals 2015). So, proving robbery in that particular case would not necessarily be easy.
Edit: That was exactly the basis for the acquittal. See starting at 4:30 here
... There's video of Hacker shouting that he will break Ngo's phone, along with two gym employees testifying that Hacker had Ngo's phone in his possession while trying to leave the gym and only returned it to Ngo after being stopped by those gym employees. The judge explicitly considering and justifying his judgement by considering whether Hacker went into a short-lived fugue and then having no idea why he had the phone... sounds a bit more than the typical level of consideration.
Yes, there is certainly some evidence to support the charge, which is why the grand jury returned the indictment. But Hacker also testified, and we don’t know what that testimony was. Nor do we know what else the gym employees testified to. The threat to break the phone does not mean a whole lot, given that he did not actually break it.
None of which is to say that there wasnot sufficient evidence to convict, but merely that, without seeing more of the evidence, it is a dubious claim to say that it was some sort of open and shut case. I don’t know for sure how Oregon treats circumstantial evidence, but in CA, a jury is instructed, "before you may rely on circumstantial evidence to find thedefendant guilty, you must be convinced that the only reasonable conclusion supported by the circumstantial evidence is that thedefendant is guilty. If you can draw two or more reasonable conclusionsfrom the circumstantial evidence, and one of those reasonableconclusions points to innocence and another to guilt, you must accept theone that points to innocence."
I didn't see that on the video, though I had it on fast forward so I might have missed it. What is the time stamp for that?
6:09 is where the judge lists potential alternate intents, with an approximate transcript of :
I don't get where you get fugue state out of it. That seems to be a reference to the very commonn phenomenon of a person doing something while in an agitated state and then turning around a minute later and saying to himself "what the fuck did I do that for."
Overall, it seems to be a very standard " the defendant acted wrongfully, but there is not enough to show, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he committed the specifuc crime he is charged with."
Again, that is not to say that someone could not reasonably conclude the opposite.
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