Currently in IMHO the thread about the upstanding citizen who got busted for growing pot and psychadelic mushrooms has morphed into a conversation about Jury Nullification.
I had never heard of it before coming here but it is mentioned quite a bit on the SDMB. Judging by having never heard of it before I would suspect pretty rare. If I were to just use what I see here I would think it is pretty common.
So how common is it? Are there any instances of it from cases I may have heard about?
In the early years of the United States juries were often informed of their right to nullify. That is, they could judge the law as well as the facts.
Today it is far different. Judges instructions to the jury generally (I say generally because it differs from place to place) that it is their duty to apply the law as given to them and attorneys are prohibited from suggesting to a jury that nullification is an option of theirs. As such, the jury would just have to know on their own that nullification is a possibility and I read (somewhere, I forget now) that prior to a verdict if a judge learns of a juror’s intention to nullify they may be removed from the jury.
Whether nullification should be a feature of American jurisprudence is hotly debated. Some see it as a check on the government and is partly why we have jury trials in the first place. Your peers are meant to determine if you committed a crime, not the government. On the flip side you could get instances where a (say) white jury would refuse to convict a white man for committing a crime against a black man.
Wiki has a fairly lengthy article on jury nullification, and another almost as long on jury nullification in the U.S. And here is the site for the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), an advocacy group in favor (surprise) of jury nullification.
Nobody knows. At least, not enough to give a detailed answer. Juries just return a Guilty/Not Guilty verdict, they don’t explain why or how they decided on that verdict. So how could anybody accurately count this?
If you’re saying that the jury exercised nullification in OJ’s murder trial, you’re way off-base. The prosecution screwed that one up in about 20 different ways, and you only need to screw up a criminal trial one way to raise reasonable doubt.
Ask the jurors. There aren’t nearly as many restrictions jury research in the US as there are in other common law countries. Hell the Michael Jackson jury gave a press conference after the trial was over.
I was on a jury about three years ago in a civil case. One boy (15 years old) was being sued by another (also 15) for an accident that had happened when they were quite a bit younger (6 i believe). They had been at a slumber party, and started shooting rubber bands at each other and one had shot the other in the eye. At that point, the fun and games were over.
The boy that had been shot developed a lazy eye, and was basically suing because he got made fun of and had to wear corrective lenses.
By the letter of the law, as instructed by the judge, we should have found for the plaintiff and paid him the money he was asking for, but we could not bring ourselves to make someone pay for a simple childhood accident. We found for the plaintiff, but awarded him nothing.
The judge was none too pleased. I have never felt bad about it though.
Point of pride: at the ripe old age of 24, I was asked to be foreman. I was unable to secure a juicy bribe for my fellow jurors and I, however
We should also keep in mind the difference between true “nullification” in which the jurors say a law is a bad law and they are not going to apply it and those cases where a jury says a law is a good one, but they are not going to apply it in this particular case. An example of the first might be a jury whic says “There should not be a law against smoking pot in your own home and therefore although this person is clearly guilty of doing that, we are not going to convict him.” An example of the second would be a jury which says “The law against stealing a car is a good one, but because of special circumstances in this case we are not going to convict the accused.”
Wouldn’t most jury nullification cases result in a hung jury anyway? I’d have a tough time imagining 12 jurors all agreeing to disregard the judge’s instructions and find a defendant not guilty because they think the law is unjust, but a single juror refusing to vote guilty seems a lot more likely.
You do realize that in point of fact it would have been the defendant’s (parents’) homeowner’s insurance company that would have likely been on the hook if you had made an award?
But of course, attorneys are not allowed to inform juries of the existence of insurance coverage. That seems a silly rule to me, as it leads to results like the one you describe, where jurors decline to make an award out of sympathy for the defendant, unaware that insurance coverage is available to pay the verdict.
Except the reason for that law is that the otherwise you would have a situation where the jury doesn’t think that the Defendant is at fault but finds for the plaintiff because they know that the only person out of pocket will be the insurance company.
I don’t think that the jury should make an award based on the knowledge or assumption that the only party that will suffer from their decision would be a uninvolved third party who can (presumadely) handle it because of their deep pockets.
Yes, we did consider this (even though we shouldnt have). It didnt really matter. If it was just an accident, which it was, then NO ONE should have to pay. Yes, the insurance company has deep pockets, but somewhere, somehow, they are going to recoup that from thier customers. It’s not like the buck would stop at State Farm…
So assume that we have decided that this was a complete and total accident, and that fault could not be assigned. What are our options? Make someone pay a huge amount of money for something that was, at worst, two very young kids faffing about? And yes, we could have altered the amount of money the plaintiff would have been awarded, but if he recieved any, why not all? The number he was asking for had no bearing on his real life situation; he hadnt had to have lots of expensive surgeries or anything like that. In fact, one of his main complaints was that he wasn’t as good at Counter Strike anymore, no lie.
To me, this was a clear example of someone trying to take care of themselves financially on the back of someone else. But, by the letter of the law, one kid shot the rubber band, one kid got hit by it. You’re right in that you could clearly label one a “victim” and one a “shooter”, but to assign financial laibilty to one or the other wasn’t as easy as thier labels would imply.
