CAN YOU GO TO JAIL FOR HANDING OUT PAMPHLETS?

• Author: Sullum, Jacob
• Position: LAW

A PAMPHLET FROM the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) argues that jurors have a right and a responsibility to judge the law as well as the facts, which might lead them to acquit a technically guilty defendant in the interest of justice. Although that position is controversial, especially among judges and prosecutors, the pamphlet is indisputably a form of speech protected by the First Amendment--unless you try to distribute it in front of a courthouse.

Or so say prosecutors in Mecosta County, Michigan. Last summer they persuaded a jury to convict local activist Keith Wood, who was arrested in 2015 for handing out FIJA flyers near the county courthouse, of a misdemeanor. District Judge Kimberly Booher sentenced him to eight weekends in jail, $545 in fines, 120 hours of community service, and six months of probation.

The law under which Wood was convicted applies to "a person who willfully attempts to influence the decision of a juror in any case by argument or persuasion, other than as part of the proceedings in open court in the trial of the case." Wood, who is free while he appeals his conviction, argues that there was no decision to influence. The only case pending at the courthouse on the day he distributed the flyers involved a man accused of illegally filling a wetland on his own property, and it was settled by a guilty plea.

Wood's lawyer, David Kallman, also...