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.