Welcome to the Montana Fully Informed Jury Association website!  Montana is the original home of the Fully Informed Jury Association, America’s largest association dedicated to jury rights advocacy.  The organization was started more than two decades ago by Montanans Don Doig and Larry Dodge to educate Americans about the eternal, historic and constitutional power of juries to protect their neighbors by vetoing bad laws and checking bad prosecutions.

Sign Up Now to Help Gather Signatures for Montana’s CI-107 Petition Drive!!!!!

            CI-107 is the product of more than 20 years of activism by the jury-rights community in Montana.  Previous “fully-informed-jury”-type constitutional initiatives have been certified for circulation on two previous occasions in Montana.  In 1990—more than 20 years ago—a Fully Informed Jury Amendment initiative was sponsored by Jerry O’Neill.  It failed to get enough signatures to qualify for the 1990 ballot.  Then, last election cycle, CI-104 was approved for circulation.  Again, the initiative failed to qualify for the (2010) ballot.

We are trying it once again.  CI-107, the Montana Jury Freedom Initiative, is the first ballot initiative approved for circulation in the 2011-2012 election cycle.  Click on our CI-107 link to follow the progress of the initiative this season!

In many modern court rooms, jurors are deceived by judges, who falsely tell juries that they are somehow required to follow the judges’ orders regarding interpretations of the Constitution and the propriety of laws.   This violates the fundamental right of jurors (and parties) to have juries act as a check on the power of government–not simply a “fact-finding” mechanism.