[Late but still interesting - plus Other Articles below]Jurors Speak Out About Raw Milk Casehttp://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/07/09/raw-milk-case.aspxBy Dr. Mercola
Under the guise of protecting public health, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection targeted Wisconsin dairy farmer Vernon Hershberger, who was charged with four criminal misdemeanors for supplying a private buying club with raw milk and other fresh produce grown on his farm.
After the recent listeria outbreak from pasteurized cheese actually killed someone, it makes you wonder why raw dairy products are unfairly targeted even when sold under private contracts which is protected directly by the constitution.
State prosecutors tried to convict Hershberger for operating a retail food establishment, a dairy farm and a dairy plant without a license. However, since he only supplies food to paid members in a private buying club, he maintained that he was not subject to state food regulations.
The trial has become a symbol for the war being waged against raw milk in the US, where aggressive regulators are attacking small farmers producing wholesome raw food products for loyal customers.
Fortunately, the trial ended mostly favorably for Hershberger and made such an impact on the jurors that several are now interested in getting their own raw milk from Hershberger’s farm.
Jurors Angered Over Injustices Against Hershberger, Want to Join His Buyer’s Club On May 25, Hershberger was acquitted of three charges of producing, processing and selling milk without state licenses. Then the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a motion to revoke Hershberger’s bail and instead send him to jail for a fourth charge of violating a holding order.
This required that he not sell any food or milk from his store as a condition of his bail. Hershberger openly admitted that he had violated the order and broke seals to get into his coolers, in part to retrieve food to feed his own family.
As a result, jurors had no choice but to find him guilty of this charge, and he was sentenced to pay a $1,000 fine plus $513 in court costs. Hershberger avoided jail time and the maximum possible fine of $10,000, but several of the jurors noted that state prosecutors and the county judge withheld key information that would have exonerated him of even the hold-order charge.
Specifically, the jury only determined whether Hershberger had violated the hold order… not whether the holding order was valid. Since he had been acquitted of the charges that led to the holding order being placed, it means that the state had no right to be barring Hershberger from accessing his food in the first place.
Baraboo News Republic reported:1
“'… we weren’t allowed to judge whether the holding order was valid,'” [juror Michele] Bollfrass-Hopp said. She added that since Hershberger was acquitted of the other charges that the state used as its basis for placing the holding order, the order itself should have been been a moot point. ‘You have to have common sense when you apply the law.’”
Several of the jurors were so moved by the case that they now want to join Hershberger’s buying club to be able to access raw milk for their families, noting that this is an issue of food freedom.
“The trial was about freedom, Bollfrass-Hopp said. ‘That’s what it comes down to. It was about our freedom to choose the food that goes into our mouths. That was the underlying theme,’ she said.”2
Regulators Are Worrying About the Wrong Kind of Milk… If you believe that you have the right to choose what type of food you’re ‘allowed’ to purchase and eat, then you can understand just how much is at stake when state and federal regulators start attacking this very basic right.
Farmers and consumers should be able to engage in private agreements for food without regulatory oversight of any kind, yet states like Wisconsin have rather successfully disguised their attacks on freedom by claiming they are ‘protecting’ consumers from the villainous raw milk.
Assuming it is produced with high standards, however, raw milk is no more a threat to public health than sunshine or natural supplements (against which similar “public-safety” wars have been aged). You’re actually more likely to get sick from pasteurized milk than from raw milk!
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data shows there are about 412 confirmed cases of people getting ill from pasteurized milk each year, while only about 116 illnesses a year are linked to raw milk.3 And research by Dr. Ted Beals, MD, featured in the summer 2011 issue of Wise Traditions,4 the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation, shows that you are about 35,000 times more likely to get sick from other foods than you are from raw milk!
That federal and state regulators are wasting time and resources prosecuting farmers supplying consenting customers with wholesome food is just outrageous, especially when they allow truly dangerous foods – like poultry, beef, pork and eggs raised on CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) – to be sold freely…
Dr. Beals wrote:5
"From the perspective of a national public health professional looking at an estimated total of 48 million foodborne illnesses each year [from all foods]… there is no rational justification to focus national attention on raw milk, which may be associated with an average of 42 illnesses maximum among the more than nine million people (about 0.0005 percent) who have chosen to drink milk in its fresh unprocessed form.”
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