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From: Bill Van Allen <hvanallen@hvc.rr.com>
To: Orly Taitz <orly.taitz@gmail.com>; PAMELA BARNETT <pb_realestate@yahoo.com>; Christopher Strunk <cestrunck@yahoo.com>
Sent: Fri, February 25, 2011 8:01:41 AM
Subject: FW: Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment By BENJAMIN WEISER NYT.com

Jury Nullification Advocate Faces Indictment
By BENJAMIN WEISER
<https://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/benjamin_weise
r/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
Julian P. Heicklen sat silent and unresponsive as his bail hearing began
last week in federal court in Manhattan; his eyes were closed, his head
slumped forward.
“Mr. Heicklen?” the magistrate judge, Ronald L. Ellis, asked. “Mr. Heicklen?
Is Mr. Heicklen awake?”
“I believe he is, your honor,” a prosecutor, Rebecca Mermelstein, said. “I
think he’s choosing not to respond but is certainly capable of doing so.”
There was, in fact, nothing wrong with Mr. Heicklen, 78, who eventually
opened his eyes and told the judge, “I’m exercising my Fifth Amendment right
to remain silent.”
Indeed, it was not his silence that landed Mr. Heicklen, a retired Penn
State
<https://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/p/pennsyl
vania_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  University chemistry
professor, in court; it was what he had been doing outside the federal
courthouse at 500 Pearl Street.
Since 2009, Mr. Heicklen has stood there and at courthouse entrances
elsewhere and handed out pamphlets encouraging jurors to ignore the law if
they disagree with it, and to render verdicts based on conscience.
That concept, called jury nullification, is highly controversial, and courts
are hostile to it. But federal prosecutors have now taken the unusual step
of having Mr. Heicklen indicted on a charge that his distributing of such
pamphlets at the courthouse entrance violates the law against jury
tampering. He is to appear in court on Friday for a conference in his case.
Mr. Heicklen insists that he never tries to influence specific jurors or
cases, and instead gives his brochures to passers-by, hoping that jurors are
among them.
But he feels his message must be getting out, or the government would not
have brought charges against him.
“If I weren’t having any effect, would they do this?” said Mr. Heicklen,
whose former colleagues recall him as a talented and unconventional
educator. “You don’t have to be a genius to figure this thing out.”
Prosecutors declined to comment on his case, as did Sabrina Shroff, a lawyer
who was assigned to assist Mr. Heicklen. (He is acting as his own lawyer.)
He said his activism on nullification dated back to just after he retired in
the early 1990s, when he openly smoked marijuana
<https://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/marijuana/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-classifier>  in State College, Pa., to get arrested as a
protest against marijuana laws. For this, he was arrested about five times.
Mr. Heicklen has said that he otherwise does not smoke marijuana.
Around the same time, he learned about a group called the Fully Informed
Jury Association <https://fija.org/> , which urges jurors to nullify laws
with which they disagree. Mr. Heicklen, of Teaneck, N.J., said he
distributed the group’s materials as well as his own.
“I don’t want them to nullify the murder laws,” he said. “I’m a big
law-and-order guy when it comes to real crime.”
But, he said, there were other laws he wanted to nullify, like drug and
gambling laws.
“This is classic political advocacy,” said Christopher T. Dunn, associate
legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union <https://www.nyclu.org/>
. “Unless the government can show that he’s singling out jurors to influence
a specific verdict, it’s squarely protected by the First Amendment, and they
should dismiss the case.”
But Daniel C. Richman, a former prosecutor who teaches criminal law at
Columbia, said there was an interest in ensuring the integrity of the jury
process. “The government has to walk a fine First Amendment line bringing
these charges,” he said, “but lawless jury behavior is certainly of concern
to it, too.”
Mr. Heicklen says that when he stands outside the court, he holds a sign
that reads “Jury Info” to draw people to him. “Sometimes they think I’m
official,” he said. He answers questions and advises that jurors have the
right to nullify.
Jessica A. Roth, a Cardozo law professor, said such activities could confuse
and mislead jurors, since “the information he’s giving these people is
likely to be in direct conflict with the instructions they will receive from
a judge if they are jurors in a case.”
Mr. Heicklen, a Cornell graduate, taught for more than 20 years at Penn
State, where he was a faculty member known for his innovative methods,
former colleagues said.
He would bring Penn State dancers, actors and cheerleaders into one course
to illustrate molecular vibration and to celebrate scientific discovery.
“People talked about this course for years,” Robert Bernheim, a retired
professor, recalled.
Barbara J. Garrison, who heads the Penn State chemistry department, called
Mr. Heicklen “an enormously creative scientist” who “really liked to think
outside the box and sometimes that meant that he ran counter to the
establishment.”
About his earlier marijuana arrests, Ms. Garrison said, “He had his own way
of doing it, but he was really fighting for people who were in jail that he
didn’t think belonged in jail.”
Court records show Mr. Heicklen has been cited at least six times since
October 2009 for distributing fliers without a permit at the entrance of the
Manhattan federal courthouse. But the violations, which carry fines, do not
depend on the content of his message. If convicted of the jury tampering
charge, he could face a six-month sentence.
When issued a citation, Mr. Heicklen acknowledged, he sometimes
intentionally dropped to the sidewalk, and had even been taken to local
hospitals, where he was examined and released.
Mr. Heicklen has at times been harsh in the courtroom, and in writing to
judges. In one recent letter to the court, he said he wanted Muslims
“excluded from the jury” because he was Jewish and “Islam preaches death to
Jews.”
Mr. Heicklen has sued the government and various hospitals to which he was
taken after being issued citations and falling to the ground.
“Plaintiff Heicklen,” he said in one suit, “has become an angry man.”