15 ms·
Is jury nullification the ultimate trump card? From what little I know about it, it seems that if enough people in a community knew about it, they could 100% co
by daenz 4y ago
Is jury nullification the ultimate trump card? From what little I know about it, it seems that if enough people in a community knew about it, they could 100% control what crimes are punished in that community. On face value, that makes a sort of sense intuitively, but obviously it has to be balanced against crimes that are in principle clearly wrong, despite what a local community believes.
- c3534l 4y agoThey could, but you could do it better by voting. All jury notification does is introduce randomness and bias.
- dathinab 4y agoThis is why a judge can bring in a jury from outside of the community. But yes, the US law system is deeply flawed in many many ways, and most of it is intentionally (through also historically).
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoWhat would be a better alternative?
- bruce511 4y agoTo juries? Or to the US legal system? In an ideal world a good judge is likely better for you than a jury if the law is on your side. Unfortunately good judges are hard to pick, and elections of judges don't seem like a solution. In terms of the legal system itself, there is way too much room for power bias that needs reform. In theory the law is blind, applying to everyone equally. In practice it is executed by humans who are anything but blind. Bad actors exist at every level, police, DAs, prosecutors, judges and yes, juries. Humans, and humanity, should be in the loop, but equally its hard to find sufficient quantities of good humans to participate. Especially in the current political climate, elections for judges seem particularly fraught. A blood-hungry mob favours those who take a "lock up everyone forever" approach. Equally, seeing the court as a mechanism for politics, from the highest court to the lowest, while it might be good for politics is bad for justice. There is a lot to dislike about the current system with its various prejudices - but reform is hard because quality people are hard to find. And every bad apple in the system erodes public trust - and once trust in the system has gone it is hard to regain it. So what would be a better alternative? Not necessarily a better system, but a system populated with better candidates. In many places that means voting for moderate candidates who are focused on justice, not law. On people with character, not who screams the loudest, or has the most extreme viewpoint. On supporting those police honestly "protecting and serving" while at the same time having a police force actively rooting out corruption and prejudice. Trust is hard earned, and easily lost. Mostly its in the "lost" bucket right now. It will take a lot to get that back.
- padheyam 4y agoIndia had its face-palm moment when the jury acquitted a jealous husband of murder of his wife's lover and abolished jury trials soon after. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._M._Nanavati_v._State_of_Maharashtra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K._M._Nanavati_v._State_of_Mah...)
- lesuorac 4y agoSkimming the wikipedia page the Jury's acquittal sounds reasonable as the murder wasn't premeditated. The guy is trivially guilty of killing somebody (enough evidence + admission) but just because somebody killed somebody doesn't mean they are guilty of any specific law (i.e. driving while intoxicated or in this case premeditated murder). You do still need to charge them for the proper law. ---- IIUC, the US gets around this problem by just trying people for multiple crimes at the same time and the jury can render verdicts on each of them.
- dd36 4y agoAnonymized justice. The facts. The arguments and a decision without any of the parties knowing race or anything else.
- washbrain 4y ago"this anonymous person stands on trial for their role in spreading hoaxes in their show about Sandy hook shootings, they have made millions selling supplements online and host their own talk show catered to right wing conspiracies. " I have literally no idea how you'd accomplish anonymity in many, many cases.
- dd36 4y agoMost cases aren’t that high profile.
- bpodgursky 4y agoYes, most of the flaws in the US law system allow guilty people to go unpunished. This was an intentional choice, to err on the side of assuming innocence rather than guilt.
- watwut 4y agoAre you sure that actual outcome of average case? Or rather just a saying? US imprisons most people I the world.
- yuliyp 4y agoThis is why attorneys get to ask questions of potential jurors and ask for them to be excused.
- themitigating 4y agoLawyer- "Would you nullifiy this verdict due to personal beliefs?" Juror with strong opinions "ohh no, never"
- bee_rider 4y agoI guess it would have to become a widespread problem, for lawyers to start asking this (and to some extent it hints to the existence of jury nullification). You are under oath during jury selection, right? So I guess that could hypothetically get you into some trouble. Although I'm sure it is pretty much unheard of for them to go after somebody who lied during jury selection questions...
- sseagull 4y agoNot necessarily a full prosecution, but it recently happened in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. (Juror lied about his past sexual abuse. Nothing is really going to happen, but it probably caused him some sleepless nights) https://www.reuters.com/world/us/judge-grants-immunity-maxwell-juror-who-did-not-disclose-abuse-2022-03-08/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/judge-grants-immunity-maxwe...
- googlryas 4y agoJuror then gets a mistrial called and goes to jail for perjury.
- idontwantthis 4y agoNot sure why downvoted. This is true.
- 4y ago
- Spooky23 4y agoCommunities don’t always think the way you think. It’s cool to be sympathetic to criminals now, but the people stuck living with drug dealers and pimps don’t share that.
- themitigating 4y ago"Imagine a town didn't like someone of a certain political leaning. They could murder that person and it would only take one jury member.
- daenz 4y agoReminds me of the killing of Ken McElroy[0] >In all, there were 46 potential witnesses to the shooting, including Trena McElroy, who was in the truck with her husband when he was shot. No one called for an ambulance. Only Trena claimed to identify a gunman; every other witness either was unable to name an assailant or claimed not to have seen who fired the fatal shots. The DA declined to press charges. An extensive federal investigation did not lead to any charges. Missouri-based journalist Steve Booher described the attitude of some townspeople as "He needed killing." 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy#1981_killing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy#1981_killing
- SpikedCola 4y agoHighly recommend the Criminal Podcast episode on Ken McElroy https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-66-bully/id809264944?i=1000385113722 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-66-bully/id809...
- nominusllc 4y agoSometimes it do be like that though.
- mcherm 4y agoThey could, for instance, prevent for most of a century most prosecutions for lynching.
- gumby 4y agoInstead they simply acquitted the defendants in almost all cases, though few were brought.
- CDRdude 4y agoThat’s not an “instead”. What you are describing is what jury nullification is.
- throwawaylinux 4y agoBetter to leave the law to the self-proclaimed "experts" who wrote and enforced laws permitting slavery for most of a century.
- themitigating 4y agoYou mean people who were elected by other people. There's no difference
- throwawaylinux 4y agoCorrupt people who were elected by other people and don't necessarily serve there interests, yes. And I disagree.
- addingnumbers 4y agoElected officials aren't "self-proclaimed." Election is the best possible example of proclaiming.
- throwawaylinux 4y ago
- hirundo 4y agoIt's a limited trump card, in that a jury can nullify law but not make it, or even adjust the charge. And their decision holds no legal precident beyond the immediate case. I think of an informed jury as the tire between the wheel and the road, to fill the gap between the abstract judgement of the legislature and the concrete particulars. Tires do fail, sometimes fatally, but they save a lot of wear on the whole system.
- brewdad 4y agoThe one case I was a juror on, there were questions about specific details of the charge vs the standard for a conviction on that charge. We couldn't get clarification because the judge decided to go home at 4:30, 40 minutes into deliberations. No one wanted to come back to deliberate another day, so we convicted on the counts we were sure of and acquitted on the remainder. The aggravated details made no sense as the verdicts were read as they ended up being grossly inconsistent. In the end, the defendant was sentenced to 6 years. It could have been 60 years if the judge had hung around though.
- User23 4y agoIn the Anglo-American tradition, juries cannot nullify, make, or frankly do anything else with law. What they can do is decide the facts. Jury nullification is the jury legally denying the facts, no matter how observably true they are. Because legally speaking the jury determines the facts, that’s that. A judge can overrule a guilty verdict, but not an innocent one.
- standardUser 4y agoCops, prosecutors, DAs, judges, mayors and governors all have varying authority to "control what crimes are punished", in addition to who gets punished and the severity of that punishment. In that context, it doesn't seem so strange for juries to have some authority too. All this latitude among different actors in the justice system just shows how having an incredibly vast number of "crimes" on the books guarantees loopholes and widespread abuse.
- konschubert 4y agoMaking everything illegal and then selectively enforcing it means that there is no Rule of Law.
- whimsicalism 4y agoThere is no alternative to selective enforcement, nor has there ever been.
- konschubert 4y agoHow about we start with not making stuff illegal that we don't want to enforce?
- alistairSH 4y agoBut society wants selective enforcement. Speeding laws are good when the stop that guy from endangering my kids. Or when they generate revenue from tourists. Those same laws are awful when they inconvenience me.
- throwaway0a5e 4y agoI think one of our greatest failures as a species is that we have yet to architect a society in which these sorts of double standards of personal belief have sufficient consequences to prevent people from engaging in them with the fervor and frequency that they do.
- eru 4y ago> From what little I know about it, it seems that if enough people in a community knew about it, they could 100% control what crimes are punished in that community. Only in one direction, I think. Jury nullification still can't render a guilty verdict, when the law says the defendant ain't guilty. (At least in principle.)
- WalterBright 4y agoIt's in only one direction, because a jury cannot form itself and pick a victim to falsely convict.
- eru 4y agoA jury can still falsely convict, but a defendant can appeal a guilty verdict. Non-guilty verdicts are more final.
- PeterisP 4y agoIf a community really wants to severely punish something that's legally not a crime, jury nullification enables the community representatives to enact whatever extrajudicial punishment they want (e.g. the existing examples of lynching or "honor killings"/"honor rapes" in certain communities) and then protect these punishers from the legal system.
- eru 4y agoTo a certain extent, yes, but the punishers need to be tried locally, too, for this to work.
- BurningFrog 4y agoThat's pretty much the original idea: The jury is an old form of democracy. The king/government can make what laws they like, but it needs to have enough popular support that a jury will freely choose to convict according to it. Of course, like all forms of democracy, the outcomes don't always agree with your or my sense of justice. > it has to be balanced against crimes that are in principle clearly wrong In this system, whoever gets to decide what is "clearly wrong" has the real power.
- AnimalMuppet 4y ago> In this system, whoever gets to decide what is "clearly wrong" has the real power. Who gets to decide? The jury. That's the point. They have the real power.
- pdonis 4y ago> crimes that are in principle clearly wrong, despite what a local community believes. Who has the magical power to know which crimes these are that are "in principle clearly wrong" with such certainty that they can override the community's beliefs? We're all fallible humans and nobody has a special private line to The Truth.
- scarecrowbob 4y agoI like to think that saying lynching black folks is "in principle clearly wrong" is one example where I am okay with thinking that I am certain enough to override a "community's beliefs" about what is right or wrong. I don't think that this is a magical power.
- pdonis 4y agoThe problem is that the people who thought lynching was fine had the same sense of certainty that you have. Which all by itself is enough to refute the claim that such a sense of certainty is sufficient.
- washbrain 4y agoYes, they did. But we've improved as a species. We may not recognize what our descendents will consider barbaric in our behavior, but we can be the ratchet that prevents us from repeating the barbarism of our forbears.
- toolz 4y agoI don't think it's safe to assume something obviously bad today won't be good by many/most measures tomorrow. In fact I'm quite certain that the advancement of society doesn't rely exclusively on constraints, but also on expanding freedoms and loosing poorly conceived constraints.
- pdonis 4y ago> we've improved as a species This is arguing in a circle. It's only an "improvement" for someone who already agrees with your ethical and moral claim.
- codefreeordie 4y agoA jury is the last line of defense. The state can not use it's power to punish someone unless they can find 12 members of the community who are willing to allow the punishment. It is supposed to be the last, final defense against the perversion of the justice system into political prosecution. The state can make whatever laws it wants, but it can't enforce them without the will of (some of) the people. Probably worked, too, when populations were smaller and communities more cohesive.
- watwut 4y agoPractically it can, because jury trial is expensive, less predictable and carries much longer sentence then plea bargain. So, 94% or so of cases end without trial. The state says "take 3 years in plea bargain or risk 15 years and huge debt in jury trial".
- motogpjimbo 4y agoIf you're going to jail for 15 years, isn't running up a debt with your lawyers the least of your concerns?
- spywaregorilla 4y agoA significant debt can be the least of your concerns and still be concerning
- charlieyu1 4y agoDuring 2019 protests in Hong Kong, the idea of jury nullification was known to many people, in hopes of setting the protesters free. The government used loopholes so most protest related cases were trialed without jury.
- ltbarcly3 4y agoIt's unfortunate that Hong Kong didn't codify it's citizens' right to a trial by jury.
- krageon 4y ago> clearly wrong, despite what a local community believes. If the local community doesn't find them wrong, perhaps it is not as clear as you're claiming.
- baobabKoodaa 4y agoMerely knowing about jury nullification wouldn't be sufficient to act on it. Most people would face a serious moral conundrum choosing between upholding an unjust law vs lying about evidence as a juror.
- parkingrift 4y agoIf you think jury nullification is a potential problem just wait until you hear that district attorneys have almost absolute authority to decide what crimes are punished. One person can unilaterally dictate that petty theft is no longer a crime, for example. In that lens I don’t believe jury nullification is much of a problem.
- whimsicalism 4y agoOne person, who is typically elected. And that's if federal authorities decide to not get involved.
- netheril96 4y agoIf the whole community believes X is not a crime and willing to nullify the law as juries, certainly they will elect a prosecutor who thinks the same.
- nisegami 4y agoThat's a drastic oversimplification. For one counterexample, consider a prosecutor who believes x but also y. The community agrees on x but not y and consider that a dealbreaker, so the prosecutor is not elected. And this doesn't include issues such as ease of voting and gerrymandering.
- bluGill 4y agoThey will also elect legislators that will remove such laws.
- carlivar 4y agoOr subject to recall. Which is what just happened to San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin.
- quantified 4y agoAfter the cops decided not to arrest, then blame Boudin for not prosecuting. Cops just hanging out watching the crimes.
- shadowgovt 4y agoThere was a time in England that theft was punishable by the death penalty. When I was younger, I learned that changed because of behavior of criminals under incentives: when stealing the bread is punishable by death, you may as well kill the baker too, to cover your tracks and maximize survival odds. That might be true, but the more specific issue England (specifically, London) ran into is that trials for theft were trials by jury, and the jury (staring into the eyes of the accused and recognizing a boy of only sixteen in the box) increasingly found thieves innocent rather than having to have the death of a child on their conscience. Facing a situation where theft was functionally un-punishable by law because no jury would convict on a crime like that with a death penalty attached, the merchant class petitioned to have the punishment stricken from that category of crime. This is, incidentally, why "right to a jury of one's peers" and "right to face one's accuser" are baked into the US Constitution... A lot of actual justice happens at the intersection of the law and the humans who must execute it.
- ogogmad 4y agoChecks out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
- andsoitis 4y ago> There was a time in England that theft was punishable by the death penalty. Having death as penalty for theft is pretty extreme in the first place. Even countries that only chop of your hand seem highly advanced in contrast.
- ogogmad 4y agoThey even a used a version of the guillotine before Monsieur Guillotin to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Gibbet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Gibbet
- elliekelly 4y agoIt’s not the ultimate trump card because a judge can still issue a directed verdict or a judgment as a matter of law which is basically when the judge says “no reasonable jury could have examined the evidence and come to that conclusion”.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIIUC, unless a defendant waives their right to a jury trial, a directed verdict may only ever be "not guilty." Otherwise, it's a violation of the Constitutional right to trial by jury.
- curiousllama 4y ago> if enough people in a community knew about it, they could 100% control what crimes are punished in that community Yes, this is why juries are democratic: on aggregate, they ensure that interpretation of the law still reflects democratic will. But more to the point - theoretically, regular people in a community already 100% control the law.
- tootie 4y agoThere's a much better and more ethical form of nullification if citizens refuse to enforce a law. Just say so at voir dire. It's virtually guaranteed it will be asked when a jury is being selected "If the evidence shows guilt, will you vote to convict?" If you say "yes" then nullify, you've lied under oath even if you're never caught. And your opinion is secret forever. Just say "no". If they can't get 12 people willing to convict, the law is nullified and public opinion is clear and no law has been broken or bent.
- jwie 4y agoYes, and jury nullification is the intent of 7th Amendment. The point is so that regular people decide what is and isn't a crime at the particular level. The jury of your peers is truly the last word in the United States, and many other common law nations. This is not perfect, but it is better than the alternative. It's a check on the prosecutor's power that has been gradually eroded by the legal system. Grand juries, similarly, have been eroded in their abilities to check prosecutor power.