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I might be confused, isn't this the whole point of a jury in the first place?
The point of a jury is to get people who are unbiassed to determine guilt or innocence to help make the trial fair and not a kangaroo court. The jury determining that they absolutely did it, but the law is bullshit so they shouldn't be punished and submitting a not guilty verdict anyway is basically a glitch or an exploit. They're not there to determine the validity of the law, just whether or not the law was broken.
The real joke is that the founding fathers genuinely expected people to be fair, impartial and unbiased.
I mean, nobody in any country has found a better option yet and it's been a couple centuries.
🤔 I made a thread a while back asking people here what they would do if they were founding a country, and one guy had the best solution I ever heard anyone come up with:
It was this tiered, hierarchial council lottery system where people were randomly elected to serve on councils that managed every aspect of day to day life. Eligibility for each council depended on your education, age, background, etc. and it was set up such that you had to take leave from your old job, but your spot would be held, you'd be paid the same rate you were before, etc. to disincentivize people from not participating.
He went into a lot of detail about it, and had a long writeup for it because it was a project for his pol sci degree, and it was based on the assumption that no human involved was scrupulous or trustworthy, and if some aspect of the system could be abused, it would be.
To this day I have not seen anyone come up with a better governance idea, past or present.
I specifically meant the jury thing.
Following is a generally devil's advocate point here, because in principle I'm wholly supportive of jury nullification:
The idea of the jury being able to cast verdicts on conscience rather than just evidence does also, however, risk personal bias influencing trials regressively. It is not unknown for systems to acquit or convict someone based on racial prejudice or media coverage of a case, which is why even a sniff of conscience voting of any kind is heavily policed.
There's a whole host of selection processes that try and limit bias in trials while keeping the state from totally controlling the process, but jury duty is one of the only examples of direct democracy under most neoliberal capitalist systems; that comes with all the risks and caveats that it would when applied to any other aspect of our social and political existences
More or less.
I agree that the jury should certainly have the power of nullification. And I believe a jury should be made fully aware that they have such power.
However, they also need to be aware of how that power has been (mis)used in the past, and understand that nullification should be seen as an extraordinary act of civil disobedience on par with a full-fledged riot in protest of the law in question.
Nullification is not something to contemplate lightly. If you're going to be nullifying the law, you should be spending most of your deliberations writing a unanimous joint statement to the press, to be issued as soon as the jury is dismissed.
I think it's the other way around, not nullifying and instead condemning someone unless you're entirely convinced they're guilty and deserving, should not be taken lightly. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, if you're on a jury and not convinced even if everyone else is, don't compromise. Don't be peer pressured into ruining the life of someone potentially innocent. And, don't continue to ruin lives because of unjust laws.
If you have a reasonable doubt as to their guilt, your not-guilty vote is not "nullification". It's simply "acquittal". Nullification does not come into play when there is a doubt as to the defendant's guilt.
To "nullify", you the juror must first be convinced beyond a doubt that the prosecutor's allegations are true. You must be convinced that the prosecutor did fulfill their burden of proof. You must be convinced that the defendant did, in fact, break the law that they are charged with breaking. You must be convinced that the defendant is guilty. Until you are completely convinced of their guilt, your "not-guilty" vote is just a finding of fact. A routine acquittal.
Only once their guilt of breaking the law is absolutely proven can you consider whether the law itself is just and proper. A law that was duly enacted by the duly elected legislators of the state or nation, in accordance with the constitutions of the state and the United States, and signed into law by the duly elected president or governor.
In declaring a law invalid, you are contradicting the will of the duly elected representatives of We The People. You are declaring that you know better than those legislators and executives what the law should be, and that nobody should ever be prosecuted under this law. That is your right and is well within your power as an individual and as a juror, but it is also a tremendously bold step. You are quite literally calling for a revolt against the legislators and executives who enacted this law.
Remember: juries commonly nullified anti-lynching laws. Legislators and executives agreed that white people should not have the power to arbitrarily execute black people with impunity. Many juries disagreed with that sentiment, and exonerated defendants they knew to have violated these laws. These juries decided that any law insinuating "black people are people" is unjust and invalid; that legislators and executives should not dare to challenge the fundamental supremacy of the white man.
When I say it is not a step to be taken lightly, I want you to remember that the most famous examples of nullification have been absolutely abhorrent miscarriages of justice, and the nullifying jurors in these cases are reviled by history.
I said guilty and deserving. Also read the last sentence.
To convict someone of breaking a law you don't agree with would be "just following orders"