Except that who then decides if an acquittal was “in defiance of law and of the facts”? Maybe if a juror openly proclaimed that they were refusing to convict no matter what, then the judge could declare a mistrial. But otherwise?
Whether a law is right or wrong should be argued in a public forum (the media) and in the legislature.
If the Founders had wanted us to have professional juries pulled from a pool of lawyers (or even dedicated jurors) they just might have said something to that effect in the Constitution or in one of their copious papers or letters. I know it’s a completely irrelevant notion as regards jury nullification but I feel compelled to put it out there.
The jury would, if the recommendation were carried into effect, be required to ‘state a case’ for consideration by the Appeal Court, just as the magistrates can be asked to do.
This means that I as a Juror should find someone guilty for a law I find unjust.
Of course you are right. It should never be argued openly and honestly at the exact time and place where it is relevant and everyone has had a chance to prepare and consider the issues carefully. It should only be argued in the media, because they are best able to argue when it doesn’t matter except to sell soap. Or the legislature, where it must compete with other ideas for the attention of the self-interested politicians who are busy taking lobbiest money while maintaining their sinecures. Such issues should never be argued in front of sovereign citizens considering actual application of a law that they might consider outright stupid when applied to the case at hand.
(P.S.: thank you for up with putting my sarcasm on this, I’m just not able to remove my sarcasm on this issue.)
No…I am for jury nullification. I just do not believe whether a law is good or bad should be argued in the courtroom. If the jury, looking at everything, decides that in that particular case the law is unjust they should acquit. That does not necessarily even make the law a bad one. Just maybe bad in that instance (as I showed in my hypothetical above…a sexual assault law can be good but too broad and unjust in my hypothetical.
I think opening up the courtroom to debates over whether a law is “bad” subverts the system. Maybe the defendant is guilty as hell and deserves to go to jail so the lawyer makes the case a referendum on the law instead. Now the prosecution needs to both prepare to argue the facts and prepare to argue legal philosophy.
Does not sound like a good recipe to me.
Yes, you should. Just as the judge is obliged to apply the law as he finds it, not as he might want it to be.
If juries were the finders of law then no one would ever be sure what settled case law was and acquittals in one court would be followed by conviction on an identical charge the next week.
But you have to remember the founding fathers, were themselves, rebels and traitors. One of the biggest problems the British had with enforcement was the colonists would clearly violate the British laws but the juries wouldn’t convict them.
This happened after the War Between The States. We’ve all heard of crimes against blacks were it was obvious the black guy was innocent but convicted or vice versa, the white guy was guilty of abusing a black person and got off.
Too often in this country we simply let abuses off like this by saying “that’s what appeals are for,” ignoring the fact peoples’ lives go wasted and some people don’t have money.
While we like to think of a court as finding the truth and getting at justice, what it really is, is a system that seeks to “do the job, for the sake of the job,” regardless of the outcome.
There’s no truth. The cops will say “We just provide the clues, not prosecute.” The district attorney says “it’s not our job to find out who’s guilty, it’s our job to convict whoever the grand jury indicts.” Each memeber of the grand jury says “we’re one of a lot of people so our responsibility is diminished.” The defense attorny often doesn’t even meet with his client before the trial, it’s all done through plea bargaining or through lawyer assistants.
Just look whenever a person found guilty is innocent. No one even feels the least bit bad someone was harmed, 'cause the system divides up the responsibility.
That’s the flaw, the system isn’t built to seek truth or to find justice, but that is what we’re taught.
You are saying you would convict someone for a law you found unjust? This is the essence of how governments get more and more repressive. Ordinarily decent people acting against their conscience because someone in authority told them what to do.
Like acquitting white men who murdered blacks in the south. Do you want juries to be able to override laws that YOU or the majority feel are just? Could you see juries in Kansas (just for example) acquitting someone who murdered an abortion doctor because they felt it was justified?
There is something very wrong with you if you will convict someone for breaking what you consider an unjust law.
Both of which cases present solutions: try them in federal court for civil rights violations as has been done for decades. The fact of the matter is that juries do abuse the right of nullification in the kinds of instances you have cited. But you have made the perfect the enemy of the good by demanding perfection in the face of several dozen (out of millions) of instances gone awry. It is something of a truism that 10 guilty should go free rather than 1 innocent be convicted. Ultimately I want my personal guilt to be decided by my peers, not a legislature, judge or prosecutor who makes a living when there are people regularly convicted.
It is far more common for judges and prosecutors and police (and legislators) to abuse their powers out of corruption or overzealousness than it is for jurors to do that. The right of jury trial is far older than our republic, it goes back through the common law all the way to ancient Greece. A representative sample of the actual sovereign decides the actual resolution of individual disputes. It is a far better system than the imposition of institutional professionals always trying to aggregate power to their institutions or themselves. The movement away from juries, such as taking the law finding function away and giving it to judges as has been done in our country over the last two centuries is far more dangerous to liberty than acknowledging that the ultimate law finding function rests in the sovereign. The ninth amendment rests this right in the people, and the people should assert that nothing short of a constitutional amendment can take it away.
What a spirited discussion!
I think while good points were brought up on both sides for and against nullification, I think it would be remiss of the judge to disallow all references to nullification in his instructions. The reason I feel strongly about that is because while the intangible vagaries of a jury decision is left up to a juror(ie. his reasoning is his own), that mindset can and probably will be affected if he knows whether or not nullification is possible.
I have already read and known that in times past, when laws and attitudes less fair, all-white juries would routinely convict blacks and minories on specious reasoning, or aquit whites with damning evidence. However, such a mistake is a microcosm of the times: if a society were that racist, then unjust court cases are just a small symptom of a larger illness. I think, then, that it is not ok to bar or discourage jury nullification on those cases alone.
More to the point, I think that at the very least, juries should be made aware of their power as part of the instructions from the judge to the jury. I don’t like the fact that some lawyers get upset at a juror knowing this information. I may not be able to discourage them from dismissing jurors, but all jurors should know so as to take this consideration out of a lawyer’s mind when they consider potential jurors. Because its a legal right, if not a specific, codified right, and because jurors often already present verdicts steeped in emotional baggage, this doesn’t seem like a far fetched thing to ask.
I don’t mind a discussion of a specific law’s morality in a court. That is, after all, where it belongs. The legislature may pass laws, but laws can and should be discussed in a public forum. Nowhere does a forum exist that so perfectly encompasses the pro and con sides of a law than when it is brought before 12 members of the community and debated. Someone said that it would be too much of a burden for the prosecution to argue both for a conviction, and the righteousness of a law, but it would be equally burdensome for a defense to argue against conviction and against a law as well. A court does and should provide that forum.
I’m torn on the issue of whether or not the defense can argue the breaking of a law and acquittal at the same time. On one hand, I think the best thing the defense can do is focus on innocence. On the other hand, if the defense is hopelessly outgunned and on the way to a loss, tossing doubt into the jury’s head about the validity of the law seems like a last ditch effort. If I were facing 20 to life, I would want the defense to pull out all the stops too. It is probably not something I want to do to make it illegal for the defense to argue that, but perhaps at that point the defense can take the jury’s indignation at his cheap trick with appropriate questions about the lawyer’s credibility
Better a hundred guilty men should go free than one innocent man go to prison.