Jury nullification is the legal theory that the people have ultimate power over how crime enforcement through acquittal. This choice is taken by the jury when a person has without question violated a law but the jury feels either the law itself is unjust or as applied to the case it is a miscarriage of justice. Back when marijuana was illegal, I knew people who would have refused to convict someone just for smoking weed. What crimes would you vote for acquittal on just on principal?
Assault & Battery: If you are being harassed by a nuisance-content creator, I would allow you one good punch. Kick to the stomach is also allowed. More than one punch or kick? Now it’s a crime.
Assault with a deadly weapon: If a road-rager stops his car and gets out and approaches your car door in a way that clearly shows he’s not there to exchange information, I’d allow you to shoot them under the “stand your ground” principle until they are no longer a perceived threat regardless of if it was self-defense or not in your jurisdiction.
I actually have a personal experience having been the foreman on a DUI trial. One of the jury members said they would only vote for acquittal since the police should never stop someone just because they may have been drinking. I was intending to go to the judge and explain the situation, but as we deliberated it became clear the state had not proven their case so we all voted for acquittal. Having said that, I don’t think there is any type of crime where I would automatically give someone a free pass. That defeats the purpose of having laws in the first place.
Youtube and TikTok creators that intentionally antagonize people, even to the point of physical assault (like throwing styrofoam peanuts on someone in Home Depot then looking around bewildered like “Who threw that, bruh?”). A sub-genre of it are “prank videos” where they do things like break into someone’s house and say, “Oh, I got the wrong address for the study group.” or go up to black guys asking, “Where are the Niggarz?” then when the black guys get suitably pissed. hold up a made up flyer for Niggarz Night Club. Then when someone tries to beat their ass because of their “prank”, they play the victim card claiming, “It’s only a prank!”
I don’t think either of your examples would be jury nullification. Many nuissance-content-creators are, themselves, committing assault, and there’s reasonable fear of bodily harm when a road-rager is approaching you. In both cases, the defense is almost certain to raise the argument of self-defense, and then it just becomes a question of whether you buy the defense’s arguments, just like any other trial.
I was thinking the same thing. Depending on the exact circumstances you could vote not guilty within the scope of the law. Thats not jury nullification.
Personally I don’t know of any state statutes that I have a moral objection to. If I lived in a red state with anti-abortion laws I could see myself using jury nullification but I would have to see the exact law.
Two things about this. One, not in every case. What about the guy looking for “Niggaz”? or the guy at “the wrong house”. Neither of those would be considered self-defense. Also, there is the concept of proportionality. If I get sprayed with water, sure I can shove the guy back. Am I allowed to punch him in the face? No, but if I’m on the jury I’m saying yes - one punch.
I started a thread on this and the consensus was YMMV depending on state law and the exact circumstances of what the rager was doing and if you had an avenue of escape. My sense of jury nullification is none of that matters. Someone rages and then comes up to your car, it don’t matter if your state requires you to retreat or you weren’t really in danger because he was banging on the passenger window instead of the driver window. You can shoot them to get them away OR if you prefer hit them with your car as you are escaping. In either case I’m acquitting.
For my self, I would never under any circumstances commit jury nullification. After all, it’s (arguably) illegal, and admitting it would be grounds for being dismissed from a jury.
There could be circumstances in which I would, in accord with the jury oath, say that I don’t believe that the state proved their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
I’d have a hard time convicting someone of prostitution. (the actual sex worker, not the facilitator or the customer). Whether I’d nullify or not, I’m not sure. I guess I’d have to be on the jury and really give that some thought.
Marijuana crimes would also cause me pause.
And, of course, when people start getting charged with disrespecting Musk, I’ll vote to aquit.
Yeah, I was jury foreman once on a domestic violence case.
Basically this guy had been arrested for hitting his wife, and it was pretty much cut and dried- he did hit her, he did admit it, etc..
But it wasn’t as cut and dried as it sounded, and the prosecutor wanted us to believe. It turned out that this guy’s wife had a VERY long history of extreme jealousy, and when he’d come home late, she’d started hitting him with a frying pan like something out of an old-timey cartoon. Guy had hit her/pushed her to get her to stop beating him. And to top it all off, she took the stand to testify that she’d overreacted, and she’d been beating him first.
Prosecutor for some reason persisted in his case, but his case was weak- it was basically a variation of “this guy broke the law, doesn’t matter that she beat him first, he broke the law, and if we let him off the hook, chaos will reign”. I suspect where we were (Collin County, TX) the DA had some kind of “tough on crime” policy and tried to prosecute as much as possible even when it didn’t make sense and wasn’t a good use of anyone’s time.
I pointed out to the jury that if he had a better case than that, he’d have used it, and that this was probably a last ditch, desperate attempt to appeal to the fearful among them. We didn’t buy what the prosecutor was selling and acquitted the guy.
Those types of crimes didn’t even occur to me because they wouldn’t be jury trials in my state. Anything that would be called a misdemeanor elsewhere (we don’t use that term) is heard in municipal court in front of a judge.
Pretty much any non-violent drug crime. It’s possible I could be convinced to convict some professional criminal who’s shifting drugs by the ton. But anything below that.
I would not put my opinions publicly online about jury nullification in an abortion related cases, seeing as there is non zero chance of federal anti-abortion laws in the next few years (I’ve no idea if a years -old public forum post would be enough to get you thrown off a jury, but I’m not taking that chance)
Any act of protest against the current regime, that doesn’t involve violence against people, gets a pass (dickhead wannabe revolutionaries carrying trying to off people who are “enemies of the people” are going to do more to harm than good, plus half of them are probably working for the feds).
Yeah I have no problem at all with a prosecutor proving to me, a juror, beyond reasonable doubt (or even on the balance of evidence) that this property was the proceeds from a crime and should be seized. It’s the whole “the police get to keep whatever stuff they want, just because they say it might be the proceeds from a crime” thing that I disagree with.
I think it leads to police conflict of interest, as they often are the beneficiaries of the stolen property. And yes, i believe the police routinely steal property from innocent civilians using this legal theory.
(it’s worth mentioning here that i once had the misfortune to serve on a grand jury investigating allegations of police corruption in the 30th precinct, and we issued a lot of indictments. But also, the police had so much incentive to do the things we indicted them for.)
(I’ve no idea if a years -old public forum post would be enough to get you thrown off a jury, but I’m not taking that chance)