Too many of the potential jurors said that even if the defendant, Elisa Meadows, was guilty, they were unwilling to issue the $500 fine a city attorney was seeking, said Ren Rideauxx, Meadows’ attorney.
They wouldn’t have to feed the homeless if the city did a better job at helping them.
Everyone should know about Jury Nullification.
For better or worse, Jury Nullification’s validity is highly debatable. Its history is also mixed. It was used by juries to acquit people who were charged against the Fugitive Slave Act. It was also used in the Jim Crow era to acquit white people of lynching black people.
I mean sure, if “a jury of your peers” means at least seven other racist fucks, then it could very well go badly.
But it keeps the laws of the land on the same page as the opinions of the people. Jury nullification is as close to democracy as you can hope for.
As opposed to, say, actual democracy.
Well I doubt any of us have any real hope of that.
At a systemic level, its validity is kind of irrelevant because any time you ask a human being to judge whether a law is broken, there’s no way to prevent them from saying no because they don’t agree with the law. Prosecutors and judges can try to weed out jurors who will answer based on their conscience rather than just facts, but they can’t eliminate the possibility.
On a personal level, I can recognize nullification is easy to abuse, but if I’m on a jury and I’m asked to convict someone of breaking an unjust law, I could not in good conscience sacrifice that person’s freedom just because another juror in a different trial could do the same thing for bad reasons.
“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
-William Blackstone
I’ll take the bait. Blackstone was wrong and no society can actually function under that kind of a premise.
Most guilty people are already escaping punishment.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/194213/crime-clearance-rate-by-type-in-the-us/
Which pretty much proves my point, thanks.
I’ll bite:
First of all can we acknowledge that every system is going to be flawed? You’re either going to have innocent people convicted and sent to jail, or guilty people set free. Likely you’ll have some of both.With that in mind, what do you consider an acceptable ratio of innocent people convicted in order to make sure guilty people are also convicted? As many as it takes?
The whole point I’m making is that systemic flaws are unavoidable and therefore Blackstone’s formulation is a pile of horseshit.
It literally doesn’t even matter what system I think would be better. I claimed that societies can’t function under Blackstone’s formulation and our present circumstances prove that point handily.
Just because you are happy with it doesn’t mean it’s good or that other people should just accept it.
It’s called Perverse Jury in the UK and it’s always caused major shocks when it’s happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification#England_and_Wales
Judges don’t like it and politicians have considered making it illegal. It’s been really heating up recently (2021 & 2023) with environmental protestors being acquitted after juries refused to find them guilty.
Judges have tried to avoid it in those cases by blocking the defendent from explaining their moral argument. People were acquitted of the crime but then convicted of contempt of court for breaching the judges orders.
Too many jurors… don’t know about jury nullification.
Jurors are expressly prevented from being educated on the third option to avoid its use.
Only after they’re empaneled. There’s nothing preventing the education of jurors on the subject beforehand…
You’re not wrong, but when you get selected for jury duty the selecting lawyer will make inquiries about your knowledge on the subject and disqualify you if you admit knowing about it.
If you bring it up to the jury, that can also have you disqualified as well as anyone else the lawyers think were influenced by the discussion.
The third option is supposed to ‘naturally’ occurr, as in the jury agrees that the law was broken but the situation is so ‘outside the scope of the law’ that the law can no longer be applied. (IIRC the judge can overrule the jury in this case, but it can be a pain)
Essentially it’s up to the judge to determine whether the jury’s conclusion is within the realm of the ‘third option’.
Yeah. That’s why people, who could be jurors, should be generally educated on the subject.
I was trying to be subtle.
I don’t have the data to say one way or the other. I can definitely see how public knowledge of the third option can be abused, especially these days when political alignment is more important than facts to many people.
Good point
In this case, it is because jury nullification was originally used by racists to give white murderers a pass for killing black people.
Yes, jury nullification can have positive uses, but also terrible ones.
So make sure everyone knows about how to use it for good.
It wasn’t originally used that way but it does illustrate the point
Judges and Lawyers hate nullification not because they’re snooty elitists who hate us uppity commonfolk knowing our options,
It’s because juries that know about nullification are a lot more likely to go ahead and do it, which basically amounts to a legal form of poisoning the jury.
Judges and Lawyers are expecting to be able to argue the case based on the law as a given and that becomes pretty challenging when you now also have to explain to the jury why they shouldn’t decide the law being discussed should be thrown out for this case.
It turns the justice system from hypothetical rule of law to mask off rule of societal biases and that would be MUCH WORSE for the justice system than the present alternative.
Consider how bad the justice system is at taking rape cases seriously already, and now consider that with the defense being able to hit the jury with every rape culture "you don’t want to ruin his life over this!" rhetorical dungheap imaginable because he knows there’s no consequences for inducing a jury to nullify and the jury knows that even if the rapist is guilty they can decide to just ignore that if they like the cut of his rapist gib enough.
To get there they’d have to risk being charged with perjury since it sounds like they were directly asking that question.
Only if they could prove it
This actually is a great example of jury nullification. From https://fija.org/library-and-resources/library/jury-nullification-faq/what-is-jury-nullification.html talking about a different case:
Of 27 potential jurors questioned during voir dire, only five said they would vote to convict a person of possession of such a small amount of marijuana. Skeptical that it would even be possible to seat a jury, the judge in the case called a recess during which time the lawyers worked out a deal known as an “Alford plea” in which the defendant didn’t admit guilt.
When these kinds of rejections of enforcement of laws stack up over time, the laws become unenforceable. We’ve seen this rejection of the Fugitive Slave Laws and alcohol prohibition, for example, undermine such laws’ enforcement. Eventually, it is no longer worth the time or hassle or embarrassment for government officials to try to enforce these laws. They may be further nullified in a sense either remaining on the books but not being enforced or being repealed altogether.
So when these potential jurors said they wouldn’t fine someone for feeding the homeless, it’s one brick in the wall. Get enough bricks and all of a sudden the law is unenforceable.
I always wonder what they’ll do if I start chatting about it with other people during the selection process.
Can’t read due to paywall
So what happens if they just can’t find anyone willing to say the fine is okay?
They’ll just postpone it indefinitely and keep trying to find a jury pool.
It’ll probably get dismissed. You have a right to a fair and speedy trial (6th Amendment) as long as you don’t waive the speedy trial which happens and is why some people spend years in prison without a trial…and probably plea out eventually.
Humanity prevails
Jury Nullification! Tell a friend, tell an enemy, tell everyone. Take back our country.
Stop telling them this in advance! They can’t get at your work material or deliberations. Just give them a general affirmative and go on to nullify that shit.
Also, at the point you can’t seat a jury because they’re telling you they won’t convict there has to be some kind of slaughter rule. To stop wasting the court’s time if nothing else. Because at some point you’re just letting the prosecutor choose a verdict, not a jury.
So much time, effort, and resources wasted towards trying to fine someone $500 for doing something humane. Our “leaders” are out of touch with reality. Can we fine them for wasting our tax dollars on shit that doesn’t matter?
with “leaders”, the best course of action usually involves guilliotines.
See, this is the shit American and Canadian cities waste time and resources on instead of actually helping people in need.
Where are the benevolent philanthropists to show us the light with their “elite” luminary brains?
So the DA is just allowed to say, “I don’t like any of my choices in this jury pool” and that’s just okay?? That doesn’t sound like a fair trial at all. It’s like grabbing the stack of lottery tickets from behind the counter and starting to scratch them off. When somebody comes to make you stop you just say, “it’s all good. I’m just trying to find one I like before I decide to play the lottery today.”
To over-simplify, as I understand things…
There’s a variety of reasons a juror can be rejected, with one of them being “the juror is not willing to follow the law, as written”. This seems to be what’s happening here, the law says that if a person does X, the penalty is fine Y, and these jurors are saying “I would not issue fine Y even if you prove they did X.”
To an extent, this is the system working they way it’s supposed to, one of the checks on unreasonable laws is being unable to find people willing to enforce them in good conscience.
Although that process can also be heavily abused, such as when all white juries would routinely find white defendants not guilty when they very obviously lynched black people.
The process of jury selection is complex. It good that it’s this way, however it can be abused if the system itself (meant to keep it working properly) breaks down. One of the most important elements in that is that the officers of the court (both lawyers and the judge) are operating honestly and in good faith.
So, you see the problem.
Unfortunately this is a very cut and dry indication of intention of jury nullification, and that is a reason to dismiss a potential juror. They shouldn’t have said anything and then nullified once they actually got on the jury.
Not even intent, even the risk that someone has the ideological basis that could justify nullification in that case is enough to throw them out.
It’s actually why it took a while to prosecute the boston marathon bombers, because the jury selection ran face first into the fact that the jury pool was bostoners and bostoners lean pretty sharply against the death penalty, which is what the prosecutor was after.
