Absolutely, but the proper venue to correct these laws is through the deliberative process in the legislature, not by individual citizens who by sheer chance happen to be picked as a jury members. Hypothetically, let’s say you and I disagree on whether a certain law is valid – why should your personal view trump mine? More importantly, why should your view trump the views of legislators who were elected by their constituents?
I don’t disagree with your view that some laws are unjust and should be changed. But the change should be done through the valid and recognized venues, either politically or legal (e.g., constitutional challenges). Jury nullification doesn’t change the law – it just leads to the uneven application of justice, depending on the case and jury pool.
Moral progress, or, if you will, partial moral absolutism (I’m not going to say that all morality is absolute, but I am willing to claim that certain aspects of morality are).
Slavery and violent racial oppression are wrong. They were wrong then, and they’re wrong now. They are wrong irrespective of culture or society.
So that past jury member was committing a moral wrong, and I (may) not be. For example, if the law in question is one that results in the same kind of violent oppression, then I may be justified in nullification.
Do you think that there’s a principle that explains the difference between a jury member who nullifies the conviction of an escaped slave and one who nullifies the conviction of a lyncher?
Is it better to have an unjust law punish more people, or fewer? Jury nullification and working to change the law aren’t mutually exclusive, they’re completely orthogonal. Refusing to convict under a law doesn’t in any way impede the legislative process to change it, and it lessens the burden on victims of the unjust law.
Again, why should your personal view of the law override a law that has at the very least gone through at least one level of the democratic process? I think the romantic notion of a juror using jury nullification to save the defendant from an unjust law is popular with some posters here, but the flip side of that coin is that just laws can be nullified in the same way by individual jurors who happen to disagree with those laws.
Lets take a hypothetical situation where a white criminal defendant is being tried under a hate crime statute, based on charges that he killed a black victim based on racial motives. Do you believe that a juror has the right to nullify the hate crime law (and decline to convict) simply because he genuinely thinks that hate crime laws are unjust?
Lets take another scenario, this time from tax law arena. Assume a defendant is charged with tax evasion, due to failure to pay income tax. One of the jurors genuinely believes that the income tax is unjust. In your view, would it be morally acceptable for this juror to nullify the income tax laws and refuse to convict?
Due to an unintentional hijack by me, this issue came up in the Pit thread about (former) justice Moore in Alabama. I am copying the relevant posts here in the event that people still wish to discuss it.
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Moore reminds me of some of those people in the Jury Nullification thread, who think that their personal opinion trumps established legal processes. Plus megalomania.
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This is all wrong on so many levels.
First, what I am defending is the principle that the legal system ought not to be overthrown, in any case, by the individual opinions of one person. It doesn’t matter if that opinion is right or wrong. You might have supporters in your posited case, but they would be just as wrong as you are (about this point, not about their support for LGBT rights).
Second, it is not “the law” that is the epitome of virtue, it is the legal process that protects us from anarchy and vigilantism.
Third, no legal system or process is ever going to be perfect. If your standard is “it has to be perfect or I don’t support it” then you are doomed to a lifetime of complete disappointment. You are free to argue about it, but you ought not to be free to act in the way you propose.
(What follows did not appear in the other thread): I would like to add that of course (former) justice Moore thinks that the legal system is unfair and unjust as applied to his case, he as much as said so. What his particular beef with that system is is not relevant to the principle.
This truly surprises me as the concept of jury nullification in US law comes from UK law, and specifically the actions of one William Penn, of whom I’m sure you’ve heard.
“The Law” has ALWAYS been - since before the revolution - That jurors have the RIGHT to Nullification.
Even if it is ‘just because they don’t like the law’, or ‘The defendant isn’t really a bad kid, and I don’t believe he needs this conviction on his record because it could ruin his life’
Jury Nullification is a defense against the government.
AND
The ‘majority’ of voters, or ppl that have time to call their representative are NOT always correct. Believe it or not, most ppl don’t want to think about whether the Gov’t is doing wrong - look around at what it is taking to try to get cops to quit murdering ‘en masse’ - or just when the ‘feel like it’ …
Our Gov’t is now is MORE corrupt than was the Gov’t of King George III whom we rebelled against 240 + years ago.
You people who are arguing against this freedom, this right, seem like simple fools to me. I mean how can you argue for upholding ‘The Law’ when -(as you should know)- that most things that most American citizens are charged with are Unconstitutional Laws.
DO you forget that the USA has more people in Prison than Any Other Nation??
USA has ~250,000 ppl, China 1,200,000,000 ppl, India ~1billion … are we really More Free?
/rant
Because I am being asked to render a vote. Jurors, legislators, judges, prosecutors, and many other people all share responsibility to see that justice is done. Ultimately I have to do what I feel is right.
We can both come up with examples of just and unjust laws, and racist or divine jurors, but I think the question comes down to whether or not there is any moral principle more important than the rule of law. I think there is. And I would refuse to convict under what I felt to be a sufficiently unjust law just as I would in good conscience disobey one.
That’s fine, but – again – who gets to decide what is just? You can say that you are, but we as a society can’t have individuals deciding what laws they want to follow.
I’ve already raised some hypotheticals that you chose to acknowledge but ignore. Jury nullification sounds good so long as you’re the one choosing to disregard laws you don’t agree with, but what happens when someone with a different view than yours sits on a jury and does the same? Suppose someone who politically disagrees with Obamacare happens to sit on a jury – does he have a right, in your view, to decline to convict a tax evasion defendant based on his political beliefs? What about another juror who genuinely believes that his religious beliefs trump a gay couple’s right to marriage? Does this juror have the moral right to decline to convict a defendant charged with violating the couple’s civil rights, based on his religiously-grounded (and moral) beliefs?
Except in limited circumstances, the judiciary of England and Wales (and I presume Scotland) do not have the power of judicial review. So nullification is more appropriate there, since a reviewing court cannot correct the problem that the underlying law is unjust.
But that is what makes nullification a bad thing in the US, as dofe notes. An unjust - or at least unconstitutional - law may require review by a higher court. But nullification prevents matters from taking their proper course.
Individuals always decide what laws they want to follow. We’re people, not robots.
The problem is that you’ve chosen your hypotheticals entirely from the set of laws that we both generally agree with. But what about laws that are actually tyrannical? Should I in good faith convict someone who is being persecuted by the state?
What if there’s a law that says certain people have to be rounded up into camps, and the defendant is someone who hid such a family from the authorities?
Such laws do not create, write and pass themselves. They are proposed by congresscritters that are trying to appease the citizens that put them into office, and supported by these selfsame citizens. These same laws can be overturned in a structured, timely and legal fashion by said citizens, and when/if the time comes that such a legal avenue is no longer offered the citizens of this country I daresay things will have regressed to such a degree that any attempt to “nullify” will earn said “nullifier” a free trip to the same camp as the accused…or worse.
And yet, such laws have been passed, and people have been prosecuted under them.
So, now that you’re seated on the jury, vote to convict, or not?
It sounds like maybe you’re saying “vote to convict, and hope that the rest of the process works as intended to undo the law and void their conviction”. But since you didn’t exactly say that, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. Perhaps you’re saying “I don’t like your hypothetical and refuse to answer.”
Which I think is unfair. None of the hypotheticals posed to me asked what I would do (for the record, I would vote to convict the lyncher, the abortion clinic arsonist, and the white murderer of a black man under a hate crime law, assuming the evidence proved their guilt). And I think someone who would nullify those trials is in the wrong.
So, how important is the rule of law to you? Important enough to let it steamroll innocents when you could, without risking personal reprisal, simply refuse to vote affirmatively for their punishment?
“We the jury find the defendant guilty of a law that should be overturned in a structured, timely and legal fashion by…” is probably not an actual verdict you can return.
I am saying that if I find a law to be objectionable, then I will among those who are fighting legally and openly to overturn it. Petition, referendum, election, the court system-these options, unlike yours, can actually overturn bad laws. Any prosecutor with an I.Q. over 75 will quickly find out that I am unsuitable if there is even a chance that the law(s) I am actively fighting against will come up in trial.
If you were that much against the law and had fought against it already using the avenues I had described, and the prosecution hadn’t bothered to disqualify you, then I wouldn’t worry too much about them winning that case in the first place.