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On the two juries on which I’ve served, jury nullification was indirectly addressed by the judges who, in not so many words, claimed it was not legal for us to
by garciasn 2y ago
On the two juries on which I’ve served, jury nullification was indirectly addressed by the judges who, in not so many words, claimed it was not legal for us to apply it.
Disingenuous and awful; there’s no wonder it exists when the judiciary thinks it can will it out of existence.
- petercooper 2y agoIn the UK, there's a plaque at the Old Bailey court that specifically commemorates the right of juries to acquit a defendant according to the conscience of the jurors. Judges, oddly, aren't big fans of it.
- dcrazy 2y agoIt’s not legal. It’s an intentional perversion of the course of justice by the jury. But it’s something that cannot be prosecuted without impugning the independence of the jury.
- harimau777 2y agoOne man's perversion is another man's justice. If the law itself is unjust then the only just course a jury can take is to find the defendant not guilty.
- kstrauser 2y agoIt’s the entire reason for having a jury of your peers in the first place. We got tired of our countrymen being convicted of breaking another nation’s dumb laws, so we put a mechanism in place assuring that some has to be guilty in the eyes of their neighbors, not some distant government. Jury nullification is just about the most American thing I can imagine. Saying “I don’t care if he did it, it’s a dumb law and I’m not convicting him for it” is our birthright.
- amenhotep 2y agoThis post seems to evince a belief that America invented juries? You didn't.
- amenhotep 2y agoIn fact, you're not very good at them! Voir dire is a ridiculous process that doesn't exist in England and Wales.
- kstrauser 2y agoI have no idea how you got that from what I wrote. I never claimed, or thought, that America invented juries. Neither did we invent congresses or constitutions, but we also enacted them because we recognized them as good and useful ideas.
- bdangubic 2y agoamen
- giraffe_lady 2y ago[dead]
- kstrauser 2y agoThe whole notion that a court could require you to find a certain way is absurd. As a juror, your judgement outranks everyone else’s in the room. I’m not some sovcit nutjob either, but someone who took standard US public school and university civics classes and paid close attention because it fascinated me.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoAre you sure that's what the judges said? Judges do sometimes give instructions that are directly about jury nullification, but a lot of things that indirectly sound like they could be about nullification really aren't. Remember that jury nullification, if you support it, is a very narrow exception to the general principle that juries are deciding facts rather than law. It would be an obvious miscarriage of justice if a juror tried to "nullify" the reasonable doubt standard because they think the defendant is guilty, or "nullify" some valid defense to the crime because they don't think the legislature should have included it.
- adastra22 2y agoAs happened in Scott Peterson, for example.
- Nasrudith 2y agoI thought it was specifically some very lawyerly shenanigans that you couldn't legally talk about it while a juror in the course of your duties (without it being grounds for your dismissal from the jury) but they specifically couldn't stop you from engaging in it. Making the whole thing into an induction puzzle of sorts to leave the nullifier to persuade the others into a 'not guilty' without explicitly invoking the idea of jury nullification.