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Given so many people with strong feelings about copyright law, has there been any widely publicized occurence of jury nullification on a case like this?
by j-bos 3y ago
Given so many people with strong feelings about copyright law, has there been any widely publicized occurence of jury nullification on a case like this?
- shiroiushi 3y agoHas there been any widely publicized occurrence of jury nullification on any case? I feel like it's something that certain people on the internet bring up a lot, but in reality pretty much never happens.
- tarxvf 3y agoGenerally speaking you can't just admit to jury nullification without potentially undoing the nullifcation. All you can really do is say "not guilty". If you want to find jury nullification you have to find cases where the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of conviction but the jury didn't convict anyway. And that can be hard to say, since outside of the court you often don't know exactly what the jury saw and the variation in juries can be pretty astounding.
- shiroiushi 3y agoSo if jurors admit that they changed their verdict because they disagreed with the law, does that cause a mistrial?
- j-bos 3y agoianal but I believe so, it's the jury's duty under the law to decide based on the law and the facts presented at trial, anything else is a violation of that duty. Jury nullification works because there's no way to prove the why for a juror's decision. Arguably jury nullification is a feature of the right to trial by a jury of peers.
- seanhunter 3y agoHere you go. This happened in the UK. Protesters admitted they had done the damage, the judge said there was "no defense in law" for the protesters actions but the jury acquitted anyway. It was definitely widely publicised - the case was across all the media in the UK when it happened. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/jury-acquits-extinction-rebellion-protesters-despite-no-defence-in-law https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/jury-acq...