In several other recent threads (e.g., this one), posters have stated that a jury can only evaluate the facts, not the law. (OK, so this is an Americentric thread. Non-US citizens should feel free to chime in the advantages of on non-US systems of law on this point.)
Why limit a jury to only a review of the facts?
And if the jury is limited to only review facts, why do we need a jury of our peers? It seems like a judge or panel of judges can evaluate the facts just as well, and perhaps better sometimes.
I was under the impression that a jury of peers is provided to curb governmental abuse. But, how can the jury properly curb governmental abuse without also reviewing the law as well as the facts of a case?
Is this restriction of the jury to review of the facts just another one of those governmental abuses that is meant to be curbed?
Or are the people who advocate jury nullification the bad guys by hamstringing the system? (Of course, here I’m talking about nullification by juries of the law.)
Is this where the “we are a nation of laws” people and the “following orders is no excuse if the orders are illegal/immoral” people fight with each other with no resolution in sight?
Undoubtedly. The jury system is not in any way, shape, or form the best way to determine the truth of a case and act appropriately–just as a democracy is by no means the most effective way to run a government. But a jury of your peers ensures that you won’t be railroaded by the aristocracy/the govt. (remember social classes? very real issue to our forefathers).
And limiting the juries’ duties to the evaluation of facts, rather than the evaluation of laws, simplifies the process immensely. IOW, there’s a time and place for everything. If the elected county sheriff arrests you, you can’t refuse to go to jail just because you voted for the other guy. If you don’t like his style, you get to try to change it at election time. Likewise with the laws–don’t like them? Either convince your representatives to change them or campaign like hell to elect someone else who will. The trial is not the place to dicker about laws, it’s the place to follow them.
Wow. That’s one of the most terrifying sentences I’ve ever read.
The forcing of juries to blindly follow, rather than evaluate, the law in question in a particular case is quite possibly the greatest abomination to due process that has ever been foisted upon the American legal system.
Ever since the Zenger trial, which gave Americans both the practical concept of jury nullification and of truth as a defense against libel and slander, the jury was supposed to be the first line of defense against unjust laws. If the law was in violation of civil/human rights, the jury was SUPPOSED to do away with it by not convicting.
However, those who make and enforce the laws weren’t able to put as many people in jail as they thought they should be able to, and in the last half century or so, it has become unfashionable and (gasp) anti-American to question whether every leaf on the tree of law and order is healthy or not. As a result, jury nullification has gone from an essential part of the legal process to an anti-American, anarchistic plot to hamstring the government and prevent justice. It’s lunacy, but it’s lunacy that the legal system has propogated upon us because that system is, after all, the one that makes, interprets and provides us information on the law.
My biggest beef with the jury system is the ridiculous rules that are imposed.
The jurrors aren’t supposed to talk to each other about the case until deliberation time. You throw 12 people with nothing in common together for a potentially long time and forbid them to talk to each other about what they are doing.
Why can’t the jury ask questions of the witnesses, or at least submit questions to the lawyers that they would like to have answered?
Why can’t the jurrors see a transcript of what was said when they are deliberating? Sometimes you can’t remember exactly what a witness said, and it’s important to know.
I’ve been on 2 lengthy juries and these issues were problems both times. I don’t seee the advantage of having a mute and powerless jury.
It works both ways. If a jury can find a defendent innocent because they believe the laws are unjust, they can find a defendent guilty because they don’t like his mannerisms or personality or any other number of superficial factors. That is why a jury is instructed to evaluated the facts against established laws. They are not supposed to rule based on “impressions”, “gut feelings”, the alignment of the stars or anything else of that nature.
First, juries still exist because there is a distrust of having government officials make all the decisions. In the last analysis judges are government officials, appointed or elected, and with an innate bias in favor of the powers that be. That is the reason we still have juries. That there ever were juries is an accident of history having to do with the way disputes were resolved in Saxon, Norman and Plantaganent England. Initially the jury was the witnesses conferring to reach a consensus, then, in time, the jury became a group of disinterested neighbors listening to the witnesses and deciding what happened. With (I think, Henry III) the jury’s deliberations and the collection of the evidence were presided over by the King’s judge.
Second, in jury cases the jury decides the facts. In criminal cases the fact to be decided is whether or not the defendant did the crime. In civil cases the questions are a little more complex–whether the defendant’s actions were lawful and the amount of damage suffered by the plaintiff. This is a terrible oversimplification. The judge, the public officer learned in the law, tells the jury what the law is --what acts constitute a crime in criminal cases and what acts make out unlawful behavior and the items of loss that can be compensated by a money judgement in a civil case. Again, this is a terrible oversimplification. The judge, being learned in the law, gets to “instruct” the jury on these things and decide what information can be presented to the jury for its consideration.
Third, we still use juries because all sides to litigation think that they have a better chance of coming out ahead if the questions are submitted to a body that has not heard it all before and which has probably less inclination to prejudge than does a judge. Trial to a jury serves the purposes of the litigants.
The instruction not to talk about the case before it is submitted is an instruction not to decide the case before everyone has a chance to submit all the evidence and argument.
The judge’s instructions are designed to give the jury as direct and unbiased statement of the law applicable to the case as can be done. The admonition to the jury that the judge is the sole source of the law is to make sure that everyone plays by the same rules and to try to make sure that there is some consistency and predictability in the rules.
Most importantly, we have juries because, by and large, in most cases, juries do substantial justice.
Well presumably a jury should err on the side of “not guilty”. But how can a judicial system function if every person can decide for themselves which laws are just or unjust?
il Topo asks, “Why limit a jury to only a review of the facts?”
My somewhat cynical answer is, because it makes it easier to get convictions.
msmith asks, “But how can a judicial system function if every person can decide for themselves which laws are just or unjust?”
I would answer that it seems to have functioned alright back when it was taken for granted that it was a jury’s right and responsibility to judge the law as well as the facts of the case.
To me, it seems plain that the founders’ intent was that juries judge not only the facts of the case, but the law itself. Judges and prosecutors don’t like this, and do their best to convince jurors that they are not permitted to consider anything but the facts of the case. But I find the case in favor of juries’ right to nullify to be quite convincing.
Quote: Jury Nullification is a term you will not hear from a judge when he issues his/her instructions to members of a jury at the conclusion of a trial just before asking them to begin their deliberations. The reason being that the concept of a jury arriving at a verdict at variance with the judge’s instructions is not tolerable from a judge’s point of view. Nevertheless, a jury can and often does arrive at a verdict at variance with the judge’s instructions. That this is actually accepted by legal scholars, jurists, lawyers and even presidents, as legally justified is shown by the list of views and opinions provided below*. This is an important concept to keep in mind should you be chosen to be a juror.
Quote: The Fully Informed Jury Association … is a … non-profit association dedicated to education of all Americans about their rights, powers and responsibilities as trial jurors. In particular, FIJA seeks to restore the traditional trial by jury, and protect it from further incursions. FIJA believes that the jury is not only a dispenser of justice for the accused, but also crucial check and balance in our system of government. The power of the jury to judge not only the evidence, but also the merits of the law itself is central to its proper functioning as a judicial and political institution.
Wow! Finally. I tried to post to this thread several times yesterday and again this morning. I just kept getting a “Page Not Found” message. So I got rid of all the bolding of names, and the URL-shown-as-name-only thing, split the post into several smaller posts, and used the “Your Reply” thing at the bottom of the thread, instead of clicking on “Post Reply”. It seems to be working.
Anyhow, I used to be puzzled by the quotes you see occasionally from various founders, etc. about how important juries are. It seemed a bit overblown. Juries really didn’t seem that important. But if you accept the idea that they have the right and responsibiliy to judge the law as well as the facts of the case, then those quotes start making sence – if that’s the case, then juries really are important.
There are three circumstances under which a jury should find for acquittal. (1) If they decide that the defendant did not do whatever (s)he’s accused of, (2) If they decide that convicting would be a miscarriage of justice in this particular case, and (3) If they decide that the law itself is unjust.
One factor in getting rid of Probibtion was that, as the public grew weary of this total failure of an attempt to legislate morality, juries began to refuse to convict people of booze law violations.
That certainly seems reasonable, but could a jury also not convict based on a “gut feeling” that a person is guilty even if the facts don’t support it?
Also, do I need to mention O.J?
Yes, they can do whatever they want. But it’s not encouraged to convict people unless you have no reasonable doubt that they’re guilty. It’s pretty clear that the system is set up to encourage erring far on the side of “not guilty” than “guilty”, and obviously convicting people without the evidence is not encouraged by anyone - there’s no justice in that.
But we’re not talking about allowing the jury to convict on their conscience - only to refuse to convict on their conscience - which is a very different thing.
Well, you have to take the entire jury thing in a couple of contexts:
The accused is innocent until proven guilty.
All penal statutes are to be construed strictly.
So we have a defendant who is accused of committing crime Y. What the crime is and what the precedents are on how to define that crime strictly are the province of the judge, who is presumably learned in the law. Why this might be so can best be exemplified by an apocryphal story (lawyers and law students? is this an urban legend or did it actually happen?) where a state had defined petit larceny as stealing less than $250 or goods valued at less than $250, and grand larceny as stealing more than $250 or goods so valued. You can guess the next part – somebody is accused of stealing precisely $250, and a sharp lawyer gets him off on the charge – because in that state (until a couple of days later when they hastily revised the law) stealing exactly $250 was not a crime. (Though it definitely would be a tort…)
Essentially what the jury is to rule on is, did the array of facts presented by the prosecution, as partially refuted by the defense, constitute a case of violating the law in question? While this can be very obvious, it can also be extremely difficult to decide – especially where questions of motive or intent come into play in the definition of the crime – as they do in nearly every felony case.
While jury nullification is an established custom, the intent is to reserve it for the rare cases in which, in the consensus opinion of the jury, to convict under the circumstances defined would, though called for by the strict wording of the law, constitute a miscarriage of justice.
But being “the judges of the facts” is not normally a cut-and-dried question – if a case has gone to jury trial, there is nearly always room for argument on the question of whether, in the particular circumstances surrounding this particular case, the person accused of a particular crime is in fact guilty of that particular crime.
Ok, does anyone posting in this thread honestly believe that a group of 12 people should have the ability to overturn a law? Isn’t that completely undemocratic? What would happen if a jury composed completely of rednecks decide that killing a black person shouldn’t be a crime?
Rysto, a jury can’t overturn the law in the sence that the law is wiped out of existance the minute one jury finds a defendant not guilty. The law continues to exist, and other people can be put on trial for violating it.
But your example? I think that’s how things actually worked in the “bad old days” in many parts of the US. Whites got away with lynching and otherwise murding blacks, and one reason for that was that the all white juries would not convict a white man for killing a black man. Not that such cases came to trial very often. Most often, the white run criminal justice system wouldn’t arrest or charge the white killers in the first place, so it never got to a jury.
When a jury brings in a finding of not guilty, no one can really know why they came to that conclusion. Maybe (1) they really thought the state had not proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, maybe (2) they thought that convicting this particular person of these particular charges would be a miscarriage of justice, or maybe (3) they thought the law was unjust.
The fact that numbers (2) and (3) can occur is why juries are important. They can stand up to govt officials and prevent legal injustice. (And they can stand up to govt officials and let someone off for bad reasons, as mentioned above re lynchings, etc. I’m not saying jury nullification can’t be misused; anything can be misused.)
IMO, situation number (2) is not that unusual. There are times when, due to some circumstance or other, it would be unjust to enforce a particular law in a particular case. It’s the job of the jury to keep the criminal justice sysem from grinding some poor nebish to bits in its ponderous mechanisms.
But situation number (3)? How often are you going to find a whole jury agreeing that a particular law is so foolish, wrongheaded, unjust, or whatever, that it should never be enforced? Not very often, I’d say.
Hazel, if twelve jurors in a particular case believe, deep down, that it is immoral to convict a white person for killing a black person, why is that a misuse of the power of nullification?
If nullification is based on the principle that the twelve jurors have the right to judge the law based on their own view of morality, and their morality is that whites are superior, then how is it a misuse of their power?
If they the ultimate judges of the law, and if they sincerely believe the law is immoral because it would require a conviction of a white for killing a black, then aren’t they carrying out their function?
Besides, what’s missing is that eliminating a bad law isn’t impossible even where the jurors are powerless to do so. The lawyer can always appeal the state of the law if it’s a common law matter. The legislature can always change the law if it’s statutory (or the people can always pressure them to do so).
I guess the point that’s being illustrated here is that it’s not the jury’s PLACE to go around overturning laws, no matter how much they might want to.
The fact that the legislature can repeal a foolish law, or one with unforseen unjust consequences, and the fact that the public can pressure them to do so, does not help an individual who has been charged under that law. He’s not helped by the fact that the law may someday be changed or repealed. He’s faced with ruin and imprisonment. His only hope is that a jury will refuse to convict.
And just because a law is plainly unjust doesn’t mean a legislature will even consider repealing or changing it. Often, they are too afraid that someone will accuse them of being “soft on crime”.