“The state” is not some disembodied concept, it is the embodiment of all of us. Perhaps your religion requires you not to judge, let alone punish anyone, but we do not all share that belief.
As for rehabilitation vs. punishment, by all means. I am not generally in favor of punishment as a cure-all, not because it is immoral (it isn’t) but because it is generally ineffective.
Drewder, judges are empowered by the legal system to do exactly that, to rule laws unconstitutional (if they are so), and they do it based on a long complex history of legal decisions; also they are, up to the SCOTUS anyway, subject to review and override. To say that judges functioning in that way are just expressing their personal opinions is clearly to not understand the purposes of judges in our legal system. The stated purpose of juries, on the other hand, is to decide the facts of the case, not the goodness or badness of the law.
And I did not say that we should not think our opinion is better than the rest of society; I said that, in a robust representative democracy, we should not act in such a way that our opinion overrides legal processes.
I didn’t say it would fly, since I don’t even know what that means in this context… I said it would affect my moral judgment. Which was the poster’s basis for saying he “would not lie”.
If it is placed in the hands of a juror is to achieve justice, is it not the juror who gets to define justice? Do you not think a lie is morally acceptable, if it will avert an injustice?
It is completely false to state that juries have the right to nullify laws they don’t agree with. What they have is an unreviewable right to find a defendant not guilty, and they face no legal penalty for doing under most circumstances. Accepting a bribe would be an example of an exception.
Everyone who talks about how noble jury nullification is and how it is a bulwark against tyranny should consider the most common form of jury nullification in our country. And that is the refusal of juries to find guilty white people who murdered black people. It is a simple fact that for hundreds of years a white man could murder a black man in cold blood, and if the case somehow made it as far as a trial no white jury would ever convict them, no matter what the circumstance.
That’s the heroic history of jury nullification, the refusal of white juries to punish lynchings. The “unjust law” they nullified was the notion that a black man had the right to the protection of the law. The government might consider him a man, but no white jury would agree.
So there’s your heroism. There’s your refusal to enforce an unjust law.
What a silly, stupid, and ignorant comment. The people of now are not the people of then. And just because it was used to ill effect in one regard does not mean it was and still is used to good effect in other regards. Perhaps you might fight your own ignorance and look up the case of one William Penn?
Let’s page Mr Godwin to the thread: if there were a law punishing being a Jew by death would you follow the law and convict?
As for the sanctity of the law, Nelson Mandela reminded us that “everything Hitler did was legal, and everything the Czech freedom fighters did was illegal”. Would a juror be in moral conformity to vote in accordance with the law?
Here’s the problem: you want to retain that principle when you disagree with the morality of the law. But what’s your response when a jury acquits a murderer because the victim was a colored fellow who whistled at a respectable white woman and thus justified his own murder at the hands of the defendant?
The jury member there believes, just as strongly as you do, that the law in question is immoral. What principle can you articulate that protects your right to act but eliminates his?
I don’t know how many of those cases actually went to trial. Most were nullified by judges, police, or prosecutors. Would it not, in free society, be better to have that nullification power rest in the citizen? So when a citizen is oppressed, fellow citizens have a place to dissent?
So you’d prefer the judge refuse to convict rather than the jury? There’s no reason to think a community that is so heavily biased against black victims would elect judges who will uphold the law protecting black victims and a judge is far less responsive to social change than a jury is since a judge stays there for a much longer period and are difficult to remove.
The driving principle of the democratic constitutional republic is that the right to advise and consent is in the hands of the citizen, who, in criminal justice applications, is the juror.
Just because something is used for a bad purpose doesn’t mean that that something is bad in itself. Plus, are you not ignoring all the good that has come from jury nullification?
A citizen in the United States has multiple roles vis-à-vis the legal system. One is as a voter, where the citizen is supposed to express his opinion regarding which laws should be passed and which repealed. Sometimes this is directly, as with measures on the ballot. More often it is indirectly, voting for representatives at various levels of government.
A different citizen role is as a juror, where one is called on to rule only on matters of fact. Has the prosecution (or the plaintiff) proved their case to the appropriate degree, or not?
It is a serious mistake to confuse these two roles.
Not so. The role of the juror is to determine whether the defendant is guilty or not depending on the law. It is the legislature that makes the laws; the people elect representatives to do so.
Nullification just means you aspire to be a dictator. It assumes that your opinion on the law is more important than anyone else’s. It is the very antithesis of a democratic constitutional republic – it is rule by the whim of one person.
I disagree. If what you state were the case there would be no need for a jury. The jury is the ultimate bulwark of the citizen against an overweening state.
That sounds lofty, but completely detached from reality. In representative democracies (both in the US and the UK), the laws are to be written by legislators, not citizens. Even if you lived in a direct democracy, why should you (as one voter) have the right to overturn, through jury nullification, a law that was written by a majority?
Here’s one case. In New Hampshire a jury refused to convict a man for growing Marijuana in his backyard. I’m sure there are many more that happen every day although most do not get reported on because it’s usually hard to tell the difference between jury nullification and regular old not guilties.
Really? We elect representatives to make our laws and sometimes they get it wrong. Errare humanum est. Jury nullification is one of the checks and balances.
BTW do note that I live in Scotland where a simple majority verdict is sufficient unlike the unanimous verdict usually required in England, which makes jury nullification much more difficult. Both the cases I mentioned earlier were in England.