[Jury Nullification] is when the jury in a criminal trial gives a verdict of not guilty even though they think a defendant has broken the law. The jury’s reasons may include the belief that the law itself is unjust
Until the wealthy and powerful are held to account, why punish your fellow everyday citizens? Use your brain. Decide if what they’re charging people with is suppression or actually keeping society safe.
When those prosecutors start losing these cases, maybe they will start to rethink who they are focusing on.
I think the judge can override the jury though, right? Ianal, but I thought the judge could do that for any case.
The judge cannot declare someone guilty if the berson pleads innocent. The judge can say not guilty and dismiss a case.
That’s good to know if you live in
NY.the area he’s being tried.Edit: I realized that I don’t know where he’s being tried.
The judge cannot. They can prejudice the jury severely through unequal treatment of evidence, witnesses, and through clearly showing their bias at trial, which in practice can affect the verdict dramatically. On the other hand, doing that makes it a lot easier to overturn the verdict on appeal.
The case which unequivocally established the right of juries to countermand the judge was fucking wild.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushel’s_Case
The judge was putting William Penn and William Mead on trial for leading an unlawful religious assembly. The jury found the defendants, basically, guilty of “speaking,” but not of the crime they had been accused of. The judge blew his stack and ordered the defendants to be tied up (?) and the jury imprisoned without food, water, or heat. After two days with no food, the jury returned, and amended their verdict to “not guilty.” The judge got pissed again, ordered the jury to be fined (?) instead, and one of the jurors said he definitely wasn’t paying that, and appealed the whole judgement. The trial involved some physical violence in the courtroom when the judge would order something to happen and the person involved would tell the judge to fuck off and then resist the people who came in to try to enforce the ruling.
The appeals court sided with the jury. People remember Bushel (the juror) and his name is remembered as linked with the principle of law, and all people remember about the judge was that he was an asshole.
The irony is, despite there being a plaque celebrating it in the old bailey, people have been arrested for holding signs directly quoting that plaque.
Good for her. Inspiring person. And I’m so happy she wasn’t prosecuted in the end.
The natural tendency of any government is towards tyranny. They’re not indomitable, though, and so sometimes the people fight their way a little more towards justice.
Inevitably, when the pendulum swings back, it develops that talking about the old justice-type of government that somebody won with their struggle, is punishable severely at the hands of the new government, which is simultaneously completely happy to be claiming for itself the mandate of the old government. When the old government wasn’t even all that “good,” just a little better than the norm in some respects.
That’s hilarious, the jury wasn’t fucking around.
UK, the year 1670- I wonder if the US uses that law since we were under the crown at the time? Did we inherit any laws from before we claimed independence? I never thought about that.
We adopted a lot of the English legal system since a lot of the same courts were still operating before, during and after the revolution. We just wrote a bunch more stuff down (since for some reason even really important stuff in English law is still this kind of “everyone knows it’s that way” weird type of oral history system.) We also modified certain aspects in a more democratic spirit. But a lot of the bedrock, things like precedent, judges, juries, appeals, habeas corpus, and so on, comes from that system, so Bushel’s Case is still relevant in terms of talking about the nature of the judge/jury relationship.
Except Louisiana. Louisiana is instead gifted with laws from Napoleonic France.
That makes sense, could you elaborate some of the big differences? I had no idea.
Very interesting, thank you.