User talk:Matthew J Falkner

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@PhilKnight: while you did this I was considering the conversation. In my opinion, and I'm only one editor, this user was in the wrong in editing. Wikipedia is not a place for original sources or definitions, even if properly accurate by historicity. It takes verified reliable sources.

However, at no point do I see what was wrong with the edits and why explained here. I see templates. I see jargon. I don't see anyone spending five minutes to say, "Hey, this isn't a forum. This isn't a place for theses or promotion, this is encyclopedic. You'd like to work on Grand jury it seems, but your approach is not how we work. Would you like to figure this out, or move on?"

This user isn't a spammer, hasn't shown tendencious editing or even been around long enough for a track record. I have a serious problem with the process displayed here, and I'd like to work it out with Matthew J Falkner as well if he's to be given the chance.

If no one else cares, then there's little for me to do here. Keegan (talk) 08:05, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

As one of the reviewing admins I have no objection. Chillum 08:08, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

I've restored talk page access. PhilKnight (talk) 08:11, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks Chillum and PhilKnight, to the both of you :) We'll see how this goes...

Matthew, Wikipedia doesn't seem to be what you think it is. While I appreciate your research and work into grand juries as your profession, I recommend you have a read over this essay and stay away from your expertise for awhile. Wikipedia is huge, and if you're a smart cookie you can find plenty to write about using research and sourcing. Keegan (talk) 08:17, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

I should clarify, to have any chance of being unblocked, you have to promise to not edit Grand jury or any other articles of expertise until you're well aquainted Wikipedia's policies and can work without a conflict of interest. Keegan (talk)

And withdraw the legal threat? PhilKnight (talk) 08:45, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. "Don't revert me or you'll find yourself before a Grand Jury" is clearly intended to have a chilling effect, especially when coming from someone declaring himself to be a "U.S. Special Prosecutor". This is not acceptable on Wikipedia. Huon (talk) 13:50, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

@Keegan:, @PhilKnight:@Chillum:, @Huon:

Thank you Keegan, I think you're spot on. I would like to figure this out and move on. I'm not as acquainted with Wikipedia as I should be. I can certainly use verified reliable sources in my editing, and also use the sandbox first.

I promise to not edit any articles until I'm well aquainted Wikipedia's policies and can work without inadvertently creating conflict.

I don't have access to withdraw my my identification of a legal threat, or the chilling effect it may have presented, but I will. Matthew J Falkner (talk)

My apologies; whil reading this page earlier on a mobile device, I appear to have accidentially reverted Matthew's response above. This has been corrected. Kuru (talk) 16:26, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Thanks @Kuru: for clearing that up. What's your opinion on this issue? Matthew J Falkner (talk)

Apologies for the slow response; I was unable to fully review until I was back to an actual desktop. Just one point of clarity: you're a "U.S. Special Prosecutor" as a part of a Common Law Jury movement, and not a federally appointed prosecutor, correct? I'm just trying to understand where you're coming from to offer alternatives and suggestions on appraoch. Kuru (talk) 00:50, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

I'm a regulatory U.S. Special Prosecutor, specially empowered by the President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House in Congress, at the pleasure of the grand jury, as part of my oaths to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. In all that, I seek to find and enforce the voice of the community in the bona fide jurisdiction of the grand jury, in opposition to abuses or usurpations. But in all this, here on Wikipedia, I'm helping to educate the general public on the genuine, bona fide truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth, in the most equitable manner and means possible. Remedy to the general ignorance of the grand jury is a great public necessity. The so-called "common law grand jury" movement is evidence of the need for common understanding. Political hype should be set aside. Public necessity should not. {Matthew J Falkner (talk) 18:14, 31 December 2014 (UTC)}.

Your name did not appear on a search of the Congressional records. Could you find a record of the appointment, or of which states bars into which you have been accepted?--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(talk) 18:30, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Let's put this into a new section.

I think that was a long way of saying it's the former, Loriendrew. It may have been interesting to actually write some material on the movement itself as there seems to be some press coverage and published material. I'm afraid that this response, in my opinion, indicates that it may be very difficult for him to contribute to any article in a neutral and encyclopedic fashion, so I do not have any further suggestions on an approach here. Kuru (talk) 04:44, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

In my opinion this should be moved into the designated section as requested. I think that's a reasonable request, and I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion you have there. In fact, it seems more like strawman logic, and Witch-hunt advocacy. I believe it impeaches the credibility of this editor. {Matthew J Falkner (talk) 13:38, 1 January 2015 (UTC)}.

Reversion of Grand Jury

@Huon: re: this reversion. Please help me correct this without a public loss of fundamental facts. My edit did have historical reference, and it was outside of the history section, which was ambiguous. However, common law institutions are defined by historical reference, and my edit describes the root that all grand juries have in common. You simply can't honestly define the grand jury without the oath. That's like defining womankind by merely describing the type of clothing they tend to wear, or cosmetics they tend to use. "Juris" = oath, and "diction" = spoken, thus, jurisdiction = oath spoken. (Not my whole basis, just helps people get it) The grand jury page as it is leads laypersons to believe that the scope of grand jury liberty and facility is limited to criminal matters, which is patently false unless some lawful parliamentary or legislative act has narrowed it to that extreme. That would only apply to a particular locality.

What are your suggestions?

If you are unblocked, you can discuss your proposed edit at Talk:Grand jury. Content curation is done through collaboration and consensus, this includes the wording in articles to make sure they correspond to what reliable sources tell us so that we can then present a neutral point of view on the subject. You were bold and made an edit, you were reverted, now you must discuss what you want to edit. I cannot emphasis this enough: there is no correct version of a Wikipedia article, and the editing community here doesn't take well to people who insist on using one user's preferred definition over everyone else's.

Again, if you are going to be unblocked it would behoove you stay as far away as possible from editing Grand jury or any other article related to your professional interest until you've worked in other places on Wikipedia to get a feel for how this place works. Then maybe you can come back to the grand jury article with the knowledge of how consensus works and how to make a compelling case for the changes you propose. There is no deadline around here.

If you are unblocked and choose to not follow my advice and continue down this road, I can accurately predict that you're going to have a bad time here. And we don't want people to have a bad time here. I do appreciate your patience and relatively calm demeanor, that's a good start. What is needed from you, other than the contrition already displayed for the legal threat, is an understanding of what I've outlined above. Keegan (talk) 23:28, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Though I do understa§nd what you are trying to do, and I do appreciate it, I wish to be treated by all means fairly and equally, and I do not wish to contract into anything beyond established policies and procedures. I should certainly be far more careful after being unbanned, and perhaps more closely watched. I should be held responsible to the process, but I should not allow the ban to have a chilling effect on the proper management of Wikipedia's grand jury page, so long as I'm sure of what that is. My counter-proposal is that I initially work through others such as @Huon: who are more exerienced, and have already established fiduciary duty over the matter, notwithstanding the primary object of reaching consensus, which is, after all, the concept behind the grand jury. I approached this whole thing without seeing the beauty behind Wikipedia's preliminary and ancillary processes. While it doesn't beat the grand jury process for establishing the same end, it is still well founded and functional. The difference seems to be a strong appearance that good faith and due effort isn't nearly enough.

My suggestion regarding the article would be to find a reliable source, such as a book on legal history published by an academic publisher, that explicitly states that particular oath is a necessary ingredient of grand juries. I don't expect the oath required of jurors in a contemporary US grand jury to include references to the "King's counsel", for example. Personally I rather doubt the significance of the precise wording of the oath, and concluding that the current rights and duties of grand juries are based on the 17th century version of it sounds to me like original research unless we can find a reliable source that makes the connection for us. Furthermore, the lead should be a summary of the rest of the article. If the wording of the oath isn't discussed anywhere else, the lead isn't the place to do so. I'd say Lord Somers might make an interesting addition to either the "history" or the "England and Wales" section, but I dare hope the state of legal and historical scholarship has improved in the past 300 years and we have newer, better references we can use instead. If you feel the article mischaracterizes the scope of a grand jury's power, the way forward would not be to draw our own conclusions from an ancient oath but to find reliable sources (preferably more modern than Somers) that discuss the scope, and to summarize what they say. Huon (talk) 01:01, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

This is fantastic. The public certainly needs intelligent, non-law experts who demand understanding. My goal is to make that connection, and you are very helpful.

I thought I did provide and quote a reliable source, giving inline citations to it as required, and as you describe. Nothing in my edit relies on my personal knowledge, and my source is very well established, time tested, repeatedly published over a very long period of time by many publishers of good fame. The pages I referenced are very clear on how fundamental and necessary the oath is, but I did not go into that detail. The details spread quickly.

I also don't expect the oath required of jurors in a contemporary US grand jury to include references to the "King's counsel". However, the page is not, "contemporary US grand jury". Without England, the American grand jury would be meaningless. The U.S. Constitution uses the term "grand jury", but does not define it. It was a famous common law term. The "King's counsel" is American common law for "government counsel". I did not want to define common law, but I should have linked to the Wikipedia article on it.

You said, "Personally I rather doubt the significance of the precise wording of the oath, and concluding that the current rights and duties of grand juries are based on the 17th century version of it sounds to me like original research unless we can find a reliable source that makes the connection for us."

I'll connect that for you on the grand jury talk page when I'm unblocked. I agree that the lead should be a summary of the rest of the article, and there will be a consensus that the oath is indispensable to the lead before it goes there. Just for now:

The U.S. states have statutory versions of the oath ranging from mostly to almost exactly identical to the English common law version. These should all be referenced on the page. Differences can be traced to differences in the interpretation of translators, and in constitutional provisions causing modification. Note that I did not leave out that the oath could be modified by a parliamentary act, which translates into American legislative acts that are constitutional.

"When the English colonists came to America, they brought with them many of the institutions of the English legal system, including the grand jury. Thus, the English tradition of the grand jury was well established in the American colonies long before the American Revolution. Indeed, the colonists used it as a platform from which to assert their independence from the pressures of colonial governors. In 1735, for example, the Colonial Governor of New York demanded that a grand jury indict for libel John Zenger, editor of a newspaper called “The Weekly Journal,” because he had held up to scorn certain acts of the Royal Governor. The grand jury flatly refused." et seq. HANDBOOK FOR FEDERAL GRAND JURORS, ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE GRAND JURY. (External link not allowed)

“Rooted in long centuries of Anglo-American history, Hannah v. Larche, 363 US 420, 490 (1960) (Frankfurter, J., concurring in result), the Grand Jury is mentioned in the Bill of Rights, but not in the body of the Constitution. It has not been textually assigned, therefore, to any of the three branches described in the first three Articles. It is a ‘constitutional fixture in its own right.’ ... In fact, the whole theory of its function is that it belongs to no branch of the institutional Government, serving as a kind of buffer or referee between the Government and the people.” ― Justice Scalia delivering the opinion of the Court, United States vs. Williams (504US36)

You said, "If the wording of the oath isn't discussed anywhere else, the lead isn't the place to do so." I agree. Everything grand jury should be properly traced back to the oath, which it can be. There's just work to do.

You said, "I'd say Lord Somers might make an interesting addition to either the "history" or the "England and Wales" section, but I dare hope the state of legal and historical scholarship has improved in the past 300 years and we have newer, better references we can use instead."

Your premise conflicts with the organic nature and supremacy of law, and the concept of fundamental principles, something indispensable to a lead to a legal subject. It's up to me to prove this.

You said "If you feel the article mischaracterizes the scope of a grand jury's power, the way forward would not be to draw our own conclusions from an ancient oath but to find reliable sources (preferably more modern than Somers) that discuss the scope, and to summarize what they say."

I can validate Somers with modern authorities.

Thanks.

At this point I'm willing to unblock this account so this debate can take place at the appropriate place, as long as the legal threat is retracted. @Nick:@Kuru:@Chillum:, is that okay by y'all?
Also, Matthew, you can sign your posts by typing four tildes (~~~~) to automagically make a signature and timestamp. Keegan (talk) 08:23, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

I have no objection. Chillum 08:33, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

Thank you. Will do, and yes I can.(Matthew J Falkner (talk) 16:11, 31 December 2014 (UTC))

I do not think this account should be unblocked. This edit speaks to the type of nonsense, POV pushing, and false claims of authority we would be subject to by unblocking this user. I'm more inclined to lock the talk page than unblock. Courcelles 22:18, 31 December 2014 (UTC)

18 U.S. Code § 912 - Officer or employee of the United States is an indictable felony appliccable to 18 U.S. Code § 4 - Misprision of felony. Please clarify "POV", and weather you are indeed threatening legal action against me. Seems rather presumptive. Do you have any basis for this argument beyond your general claim of "nonsense"? {Matthew J Falkner (talk) 13:38, 1 January 2015 (UTC)}

January 2015

You have been blocked indefinitely from editing for abuse of editing privileges. Your ability to edit your talk page has also been revoked. If you think there are good reasons why you should be unblocked, you should read the guide to appealing blocks, then contact administrators by submitting a request to the Unblock Ticket Request System.  Courcelles 19:37, 1 January 2015 (UTC)

Trying to empanel a grand jury, or asking people on Wikipedia to "swear under penalty of indictment for perjury" is just utterly unacceptable. I've removed your ability to edit this page, and I'll shortly remove the two sections that appeared overnight. Courcelles 19:46, 1 January 2015 (UTC)