Talk:William G. Young

Bot-created subpage

A temporary subpage at User:Polbot/fjc/William G. Young was automatically created by a perl script, based on this article at the Biographical Directory of Federal Judges. The subpage should either be merged into this article, or moved and disambiguated. Polbot (talk) 21:13, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Known for requiring an oath from jurors? I think not.

On 18 Januwary, 2009, anonymous IP 75.171.176.250 added the following sentence fragment, with the comment "updated case history":

Known for his requiring an oath from jurors ""Would you be able to set aside your own reading of the Constitution, the judge’s past instructions, and judge the facts based solely upon the judge’s explanation of the law?" 6

(The reference 6 was to this article: http://http://www.lewrockwell.com/eddlem/eddlem24.html)

This addition does not belong in the article about Judge Young, for several reasons:

Reason #1: The cited source for the accusation is an article on a blog site, lewrockwell.com, which is not a Reliable Source. Not only are blog sites, in general, not considered Reliable Sources (except for documenting the opinions of their authors), the LewRockwell.com site is especially questionable, for its occasional extreme nuttiness. For example, here you can see a copy of the main page of the LewRockwell.com web site as it appeared on Tuesday, April 13, 2004, when the lead story was an article entitled "White House Complicity? / Yes, says Claremont theologian David Ray Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor." (That article claims that President Bush was complicit in the 9-11-2001 attacks on the USA.)

Reason #2: The cited source does not support the accusation. The accusation is that Judge Young is "known for" requiring an unreasonable oath from jurors, which makes it sound as though Judge Young is (in)famous for that practice. However, the cited source on the LewRockwell.com web site discusses just one narcotics case, and the author is an annoyed juror who was dismissed from the jury in that case. There is no indication there that Judge Young is "known for" such a practice.

The juror is a blogger, and he also discussed the injustice of Judge Young dismissing him from the jury in an article on his own blog site, his rebuttal to Judge Young's memorandum about the juror's dismissal from the jury. From Judge Young's memorandum, we learn that the juror, Thomas Eddlem, expressed the opinion that federal laws against cocaine possession are unconstitutional, which promoted the judge's request for him to affirm his willingness to set aside his own reading of the Constitution and accept the judge's explanation of the law, when deciding the case. When Mr. Eddlem refused to do so, the judge replaced him on the jury.

Reason #3: In Mr. Eddlem's blog site article, he repeatedly accuses Judge Young of falsehoods. I cannot tell with certainty whose account is most (in)accurate or (un)biased, though I could guess, but in any event it boils down to a he-said/he-said argument, and putting Mr. Eddlem's side of it into an encyclopedia article as if it were reliable fact is obviously unencyclopedic.

Reason #4: The claim as written in the Wikipedia article is very misleading, in that a reader of the article is led to believe that the practice of requiring such an oath of jurors is routine in Judge Young's courtroom, when, apparently, it was just the judge's response to a particular problem in a single trial.

For all the above reasons, I am going to remove the sentence fragment in question from the article. 75.171.176.250, if you disagree with this change, please discuss it here before re-inserting it. NCdave (talk) 20:50, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

Removed the transcripts

I have removed the transcript and the quote from it from the entry as they are both indications of WP:Coatrack. If possible, someone should just add links to them in the references section.Elchori01 (talk) 08:25, 1 October 2011 (UTC)