Philip Welch wrote:
On Jul 9, 2006, at 5:34 AM, Matt Brown wrote:
Jury nullification does not involve a judge or some other higher authority nullifying the decision of the jury. Jury nullification refers to the ability of the jury to reach a verdict contrary to the law and the instructions of the court. Fans of the concept like to cite John Peter Zenger's acquittal on a charge of libel as an example of this.
Exactly right, to the best of my knowledge. The American legal system and others like it treats this as an unfixable bug in the jury system; despite all exhortations to the contrary, the jury can reach any conclusions it likes for whatever reason it wishes. Some activists and others, however, try and push the idea that juries' ability to ignore laws they disagree with is a feature, not a bug.
Juries under the American legal system cannot be held accountable for their decisions in any way. (As I recall, this may be a holdover from English law.) There was one case in colonial America where a colonial journalist, Zenger, was tried for sedition and libel for certain things he published about the governor of New York Colony. In addition to establishing the American precedent that truth is a defense to libel, this trial was also an early example of jury nullification--the laws as written and established by precedent led to a guilty verdict, but the jury refused to convict.
Jury nullification also reduced the effectiveness of the American prohibition of alcohol. Similarly, juries in African-American communities have apparently been known to acquit black defendants of certain crimes (particularly drug crimes) in response to perceived racism on the part of the police.
When I pointed out the real meaning of jury nullification I certainly had no intention of starting a racially charged digression. While the possibility of disparate enforcement of the law along racial lines is certainly a serious issue, I've never heard that African-American juries regularly acquit criminals on the basis of race. The only case I know of is O.J. Simpson, assuming you believe him to have been acquitted in contradiction to the facts, and even then there's a significant celebrity element to consider in addition to race. (Please note, a hung jury because of one recalcitrant juror is *not* an acquittal, the defendant can easily be retried. The primary reason jury nullification would be effective is because double jeopardy prohibits appeals or retrials from an acquittal in a criminal case.)
Otherwise, to find actual examples of racial jury nullification I think you have to look at the *white* juries, during the early years of the civil rights movement and going back to Jim Crow times, that acquitted whites of various violent acts against African-Americans and their allies. The problem has subsided and recently it has been possible to secure convictions for some long-ago atrocities, but this explains why some of jury nullification's most ardent advocates are found in the political fringe where white racists, survivalist militia groups, and radical "constitutionalists" meet.
That's all I'll have to say about this, since the discussion no longer directly relates to Wikipedia.
--Michael Snow