LESSONS IN CIVICS & THE CONSTITUTION – N
Part B
To help you understand what I am trying to get across, let me use a naval analogy:
Try to imagine yourself as a seaman aboard a ship, only in this case the ship is the credit commune in a joint maritime venture for profit—beholding to the class A Stockholders, the owners of the ship, the Federal Reserve. The Captain of the ship, for the sake of argument, let’s say is the Secretary of the Treasury.
Let’s look at Common Law versus Maritime Law: Under the Common Law, the rights of privacy are respected. Aboard the ship, on the credit voyage, in the credit commune, there is no privacy. The captain has the right at anytime to invade your privacy. Under common Law, we always deal in substance – by substance we mean with gold and silver, and we are dealing with real goods and services.
Under Maritime Law, in the credit commune, we are dealing with bills, notes, cheques, and credit – and of course now credit cards and fictitious documents known as stocks and bonds and so on down the line.
Under Common Law, we protect the right of the family – understand that this Common Law comes from the early law of the tribes of
You are allowed to keep toilet articles and everything else. But if you have anything that they think is a danger to the voyage, like if you have a wooden foot-locker and they feel that the wood might burn and might be a danger to the ship, they could make you throw the foot-locker overboard. Or, if you had some property in one of the holds of the ship and that presented some danger, perceived or otherwise, to the rest of the ship because of damage in that hold, or fire in that hold, they could shut that hold off and all of your goods would be destroyed. Under Common Law, your rights and property are considered and protected.
Now, in Common Law, we are totally responsible for our actions, but under Maritime Law there is limited liability for payment of debts. And, if we just look at that a little closer, we will find how, now, we have a situation where even our criminal law has been corrupted by Maritime Law and find people who have murdered and rapped innocent people; eight, ten, twelve years later they are released from prison to become a probable danger to society again. A person who has murdered a supervisor and mayor of
Under Common Law, these people would probably have been executed. John Booth didn’t even get a trial when he shot President Lincoln. Under the Common Law, we have the right to refuse an order, as a free sovereign. Aboard the ship, the Captain can make every seaman perform, and do his duty, as the Captain sees fit.
Under Common Law, jury not determines the admissibility of evidence and judges the facts, but its first and foremost duty is to judge the justice of the law as it applies to the particular case. It is this feature of a Common Law jury that caused our founding fathers to refer to the Common Law jury as the “palladium (i.e. the very foundation or cornerstone)” of liberty.
Aboard the ship, the chancellor does not even have to have a jury – but if he chooses to have one, it is merely advisory – and those jurors must consider only the evidence permitted by the chancellor; and they must accept the law as the chancellor dictates it to them.
The history of due process is essentially the history of the Common Law jury. The right of a Common Law jury to say no, or jury nullification, was clearly established in
In the period immediately prior to the Revolution, jury nullification had become an integral part of the American judicial system and there is agreement among many commentators that the right of the jury to decide questions of law and fact prevailed in this country until the middle of the 1800’s. By the end of the century, the power of the jury had been thoroughly decimated by a jealous judiciary.
The specific demise can be traced to four highly influential cases, three of which were exclusively within the Admiralty jurisdiction of the Federal Courts. Being Admiralty cases, limitation of the powers of those particular juries was perfectly proper. The problem is, not understanding and distinguishing jurisdictional bounds, we have allowed admiralty case law to be imposed in the totally different, and inapplicable, jurisdiction of Common Law.
Under Common Law, there is no such thing as a victimless crime, and a victim receives redress and compensation for damages. Aboard ship, the Captain can make any act a crime, and he can impose his sanctions accordingly. His concern is for the safety of the voyage, and he has little time or inclination to see that the victim of a real crime, under the Common Law, receives compensation from the perpetrator of that crime.
Under the Common Law there is very little need for jails; whereas aboard the ship, particularly when there is discontent among the crew regarding certain policies of the Captain, there is a continual need to contract more brigs and enlarge the penal enforcement staff.
Remember what Justice Story said in the Delovio case about appeals and Writs of Error? Writs of Error Are Common Law writs. Appeal is Equity and Admiralty, in civil matters, and Admiralty alone in criminal matters because equity courts do not have criminal jurisdiction. These are some simple tests you can use to determine in which jurisdiction a particular court is operating in any particular case.
Thus, because of the early customs and traditions of the perils of the sea, a very harsh group of laws developed. Because of the danger of shipping large amounts of money, gold and silver, from pirates and storms they started transporting bills, notes and credits and this developed into the evil practice of issuing bills, notes and credits when they didn’t have the substance to back them up. And this is the basis for our inflation that is defrauding the American public today. Under the Common Law, all these things would not be possible, whereas under Maritime Law they are.
When we entered the credit commune and began forfeiting payment of debt and substituted a mere discharge of an obligation in its place, we lost access to our Common Law rights and were handed a pottage of privileges; and in fact, we transferred ourselves from free allodial title to that of sub-tenants, working the land subject to the Captain of the ship. Yet people still think that they own land, and we still think we have rights, and we go into a traffic court not knowing that we are under Maritime Law. This why we don’t get a jury trial for infractions anymore.
This is why the jury is merely advisory in every court in this land, and must take the law as the judge gives it to them, and see and hear only the evidence allowed by the chancellor. Not knowing this, we have taken, time and time again, Common Law issues into courts of Admiralty and wondered why our substantive constitutional rights were not upheld and respected by the courts. Being an Admiralty court, it had no jurisdiction to rule on such issues, or grant relief, regardless of how sound your law and facts were at Common Law!
Next Week, October 16th, I will cover:
PLEADING SPECIAL MATTERS
“Abouna” & Munchkin
|