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Correction: Dr. Peter Watts not guilty of assault but felony obstruction
March 21, 2010 | 2:12 pm
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By Chris Meadows
Since the original news reports on Dr. Peter Watts’s conviction for “assault”, it has come out that the charge actually was not assault, and that charge was never offered to the jury. In a comment on a Port Huron Times-Herald’s article’s comment thread, one of the actual jurors writes:
Assault was never one of the charges. We were given one option… felony obstruction/resisting. I don’t know if the prosecutor dropped the assault prior to the jury convening, but it was never presented to us.
and in a different post (quoted by one of Dr. Watts’s friends in his own blog about the affair):
As a member of the jury that convicted Mr. Watts today, I have a few comments to make. The jury’s task was not to decide who we liked better. The job of the jury was to decide whether Mr. Watts “obstructed/resisted” the custom officials. Assault was not one of the charges. What it boiled down to was Mr. Watts did not follow the instructions of the customs agents. Period. He was not violent, he was not intimidating, he was not stopping them from searching his car. He did, however, refuse to follow the commands by his non compliance. He’s not a bad man by any stretch of the imagination. The customs agents escalated the situation with sarcasm and miscommunication. Unfortunately, we were not asked to convict those agents with a crime, although, in my opinion, they did commit offenses against Mr. Watts. Two wrongs don’t make a right, so we had to follow the instructions as set forth to us by the judge.
I am correcting the previous TeleRead story accordingly.
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Comments:
“What it boiled down to was Mr. Watts did not follow the instructions of the customs agents.”
“The customs agents escalated the situation with sarcasm and miscommunication.”
Lovely reasoning. So, if the Customs agent had told him to stand on one foot and quack like a duck, not doing so is a felony?
We’re doing more harm to ourselves since 9/11 than the terorists did.
It’s really really sad and depressing to see what sheep most people have become. That idiot jury member needs to ask himself if there will be any point at all in life where he will stand up against injustice rather than simply follow instructions.
“We just followed instructions” is pretty much the same defense the guards at Nazi Concentration camps used.
I’d suggest moving to Canada or Mexico, but then you would have to get past the border guards.
Without justifying Dr. Watts’ behavior, perhaps a little jury nullification would have been apt in this case. That’s when a jury concludes that the law is being applied so unfairly, that they defy the law, clear evidence, and instructions by the judge, and find the defendant not guilty. Here the injustice lies in prosecuting Dr. Watts but not discipling the grossly unprofessional behavior of those custom officials.
Or, short of that, as least one or two members of the jury should have refused to convict. That’s something each of us should remember, should we serve on a jury.
When I get arrested for some frivolous charge, I hope a groundswell of support arises for me as well (but in all seriousness, good job, Cory).
We are now Nazi Germany.
I invoke Godwin’s law.
Nobody was rounded up on the basis of religion, ethnic group, etc, and exterminated. Peter Watts was imprisoned for, I think, under 24 hours. While I agree that there was misjudgment on Watts’ part, and overreaction on the part of the border guard, equating the US to Nazi Germany is stupid, and diminishes the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.