[lbo-talk] Jury nullification (was: volume

[Carrol Cox]

Justin wrote: "I AM a lawyer, though I don't see that that is relevant
here. It's not a matter of what's just. It's a matter of what the law
is. People have different ideas about what is just. There are
disagreementsa bout the law, too, but these are much more constrained,
in part because we much maligned professioins are trained to follow
rules and obey precedents..... That way we don't get, for example, the
manifest injustice of one drug dealer walking because of a jury of
people like you while his co-conspirator is boiled alive because the
jury is of a different composition. If you don't like the law -- the
rules the legislature adopts -- try to have them changed. This isn'! t
rocket science. It's elementary democracy."

Some practices are better off _not_ raised to the level of principle.
Jury nullification is one such perhaps.

Aside from whatever _should_ be juries always have in practice (though
there is no way of determining how often) exercised "jury nullification"
more or less spontaneously without necessarily ever having heard of the
phrase iself or particularly theorizing their action. And of course
white juries in the south trying KKK members etc. are the most famous
instance of this as a regular practice. And I would say that
[objectively?] juries trying cops regularly exercise jury nullification
-- they assume the law says cops can do anything, particularly if the
victim is black.

Also -- I believe a sort of jury nullification has in the past
occasionally have been the route by which the populace has changed the
law. This is a vague memory from over 50 years ago, but I think I
remember reading that in the 19th century the British Parliament changed
the law on attempted assassination of the monarch because there had been
a fairly large number of cases in which juries simply refused to convict
obvious mental cases.

A tentative prediction: the only (relatively peaceful) way policed
brutality can be brought under control is by large-scale "jury
nullification" on a random basis in cities where the police are too
obstreperous. That can't happen under present political conditions --
but it is more likely than that courts, legislatures, or mayors doing
it. (Extravagantly put: if the odds are one-billion to one against every
course of action but one, and the odds against that are only 900 million
to one, the latter is clearly the more realistic course of action.)

Carrol