Slog commenter Jane Doe points to this program from the 2007 Annual Spring Research Conference put on by the UW’s Office of Minority Affairs and The Graduate School’s Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program, in which Christopher Monfort provides an abstract of his project titled The Power of Citizenship your Government doesn’t want You to know about. How to change the inequity of the Criminal Justice System immediately, through Active Citizen Nullification of Laws, as a Juror. Bottom of page 25:

This study seeks to illuminate and further the relatively unknown legal scholarship of Professor Paul Butler, in the area of Jury Nullification. My objectives are three fold. (1.) To explain in detail what jury Nullification is. (2.) Inform fellow citizens as to the history of Jury Nullification both Conceptual and Actual. (3.) Give clear succinct descrip- tions of a Citizens Rights, Duties and Protections with regards to effectuating change, through said Jury Nullifica- tion. I believe that once citizens are enlightened as to the extent of their individual power. These enlightened citizens cannot help but spread their knowledge to others, effectuating positive change at an exponential rate. Much like the elation and excitement of the young eaglet, that realizes it can fly for the first time.

Anthony Hecht is The Stranger's Chief Technology Officer. He owns no monkeys.

38 replies on “Monfort’s Abstract”

  1. Jury nullification is a proven method to bring about rights. When colonist from Britain arrived in the Americas, the British attempted to use prior restraint laws on the press(ie. stopping publication of material before it is printed). American juries, with a Stuart-Mill type view, believed prior restraint to be a violation of the freedom of press(or liberty). Instead of protesting the laws, American juries just refused to convict anyone. Jury nullification bought time until we could kick some British ass, and instate a Bill of Rights.

  2. Whoa! I just scrolled down and read who this was from. F*ck that guy. I don’t want to give any credence to what he believes. I am glad they were able to find him so quickly. Way to go Seattle PD.

  6. That is one nutty bit of writing. There ought to be a contest, where the author of the most deranged paragraph, the one most closely resembling that one, gets the Eaglet Prize.

  7. I agree with fixo. The jury nullification stuff is just bullshit. You can make the same type of arguments that the right wing nuts do about gathering arms and taking back our government by force — and you’d still be living in the past and just flat out wrong in 2009.

  8. I don’t mean to rain on everyone’s parade here, but shouldn’t we wait and see if this is actually the killer the police were looking for before we start pulling out this guy’s graduate studies work? So the fact he pulled out a gun implies some sort of guilt, or maybe just paranoia, maybe he sold drugs?

    I could be mistaken, but I thought there was more than one person in the suspects car as well. If it was his car, then he was most likely the driver, not the shooter. If this guy dies we might not ever know if they got the right guy, but I guess that’s what one gets for pulling a pistol on the police, if that is what really happened. Something about the police telling the neighbors to close their blinds, and the fact that Monfort’s gun “somehow did not go off” makes me a little suspicious.

  9. 1
    2
    wow.
    how embarrassing.

    Jury nullification is a vile way to subvert the law and justice.

    For decades lynchers of blacks killed with impunity because all it took was one racist on a jury to make conviction impossible.
    Jury nullification at work.

    What if one homophobe had been on the Matthew Sheppard jury? He could have single-handedly seen to it that the killers walked free.
    Jury nullification

    All it would take is one anti-gay person on any jury to render hate-crime protections useless.

    be careful what you wish for.

  14. ” Monfort belonged to the McNair Scholars Program, part of the university’s office of Minority Affairs and Diversity. The program aims to steep undergraduate students in sophisticated research, preparing them for graduate work.”

    Oh man, this guy is the ‘social justice’ fighter writ large. An affirmative action moron run amok. No doubt padded on the back by his leftist profs the whole way.

  18. A nut job of the highest order and one most dangerous because he AND the folks who mentored him didn’t try to disabuse him of his updated Black Panther politics. A time bomb waiting to go off. Anger, resentment, victimization, whitey’s got it in for me, etc. – right out of Farrakhan’s textbook. And so it goes in the halls of our esteemed academic communities. A perfect candidate for their grievance voicing agenda. In this case, society reaps what it so perfectly sowed.

  22. “was working as a waiter at a chain steakhouse in Pasadena, and seemed like a “know-it- all” type person, said Stevens, who works as an actress.”

    a know-it-all? Sounds like every progressive I’ve met in Seattle.

  23. What a bunch of sick racist trollery I am reading here. This is one guy, who’s got some serious pathology going on, who *happens* to be black (or, half black). If evidence proves he did the crime, then may justice be carried out.
    Quit projecting YOUR conservative racist SHIT onto this situation.

  25. Funny how 12% of the population is always in the news connected with violence, robbery, rape, murder. Even the language gets corrupted. For example, let’s take the expression “Drive-by”. Defined it means “to go Past.” but to a certain 12% of the population it means “the assassination of children by children from a moving car with an AK-47 or handguns.” To my children it still means “to go Past.”; But then my children are White.

    As to “Enough Already” racist remark, didn’t Holder tell us we needed to have a “Conversation on race” and that we were “Cowards on race.” A black affirmative action race agitator has been gunning down White police and you are trying to say he just happens to be black. It may well be that race was the motivating factor to the murders!

    Further, Whites have let themselves be convinced that it is racist merely to object to dispossession, much less to work for their own interests. Never before has a people been fooled into thinking that there was virtue or nobility in surrendering its Heritage, and giving away to others its place in history. Only Whites are ever told that a love for their own people is somehow “hatred” of others. If these murders were racist motivated, then their coverage should be as intense as those of Shepard or MLK.

  30. From what little I know of “nullification”, it sounds dubious. It matters little whether or not Monfort endorsed it. He should NEVER have ran away from police officers and pulled a gun on them who were there to question him.

    We may find out if he did indeed shoot Officer Brenton. If Monfort did and recovers from his injuries, justice must be served. If he didn’t shoot Brenton, it is most unfortunate. But, he should never have run away and drawn a weapon.

  31. Notice all the progressives, professional poverty pimps, sociologists/victimologists and Evergreen State college grads have run from this thread like rats from an aquaduct…..

  32. @23 – you can be conservative and not racist btw – fiscal conservatism with a progressive social agenda has been a hallmark of NW politics for a long time. Look up Tom McCall, Mark Hatfield, and Scoop Jackson.

    Don’t point fingers and blanket label people, it makes you look like a dope.

  36. Wow, whatever professor, dean or advisor was responsible for allowing that paper to get out there in that state of shittiness should really start considering some hari kari.

  37. Also incredibly embarrassing is this one below. I hope someone taught this girl how to use a comma before she went for an MA in Lit.

    Name: Carly Cate
    Major: English
    University Name: Henderson State University
    Year at University: Senior
    Graduate Degree Interest: Literature
    Project Title: “Restoring Sylvia- Reconstructing Sylvia Plath’s Ariel”
    Faculty mentor/s and department/s: Dr. Marck L. Beggs, Graduate School Dean/English
    Abstract
    In Sylvia Plath’s, Ariel, first released in the United Kingdom in 1965 and in the United States in 1966, her husband, Ted
    Hughes, meticulously altered the released work from Plath’s original manuscript. Hughes removed and replaced several
    poems in the US and the UK versions. Does replacing more personal and confessional poems with less offensive, more
    “suitable” works make the first editions of Ariel better than his wife’s true original collection? These changes and manipulations
    are superbly demonstrated in Ariel: The Restored Edition, released in 2004. In this edition, Frieda Hughes, daughter to
    Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, provides a very insightful, though possibly skewed, forward. Ted Hughes, in editing her original
    manuscript, served one purpose, to protect himself. Those poems he mutilated and removed were part of Plath’s original
    manuscript for a reason.

  38. Oh jesus, it doesn’t stop. But I will. After this one.

    “The researched then selected tends and looked for similarities among students decisions regarding target
    audiences and their assessment of the current marketing situation in an effort to understand the influence of
    current multicultural marketing efforts.”

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