Clearly. I've heard people claim that no jury would convict him, because everybody knows someone who was screwed by their insurance provider. A sad indictment of the scammy nature of the US health insurance industry.
I wonder what a good strategy would be for a prosecutor in such a case. Can they split the trial into several? Let's say one for using a silencer on a gun in New York City. This is a felony. The murder is clearly another one. Maybe the first should be tried in a state court, while the second in federal (the perpetrator traveled across state lines to carry the hit, on a victim who was also coming from a different state, so this might be a federal case?).
Yes, but the existence of the Wikipedia page and the act of doing it itself in a jury were a pre existing condition
On a serious note, yes it is. However, it is very interesting as a European learning about a mechanism that allows the jury to say we believe someone has done that, but we don't believe it should be guilty
Europe isn't a single place. Some countries do, some don't. I don't think I've ever heard of a jury trial in Netherland, but France, Belgium and the UK apparently still have it.
Some countries in Europe also don't have the same concept of double jeopardy that the US has and allow retrials even if someone is found not guilty. Off the top of my head, in England you can be retried for murder if new evidence is presented as many as ten times.
I recall this [edit: potentially] happening a few years back when a jury in Bristol - a notoriously progressive city - gave a not guilty verdict to four people that had helped topple a statue of a long dead slave trader: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colston_Four_trial
The right wing of the country was obviously in uproar and demanding changes to the system or that some exception be made. Except, interestingly, for the poshest and possibly most right wing MP of all, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Iirc he said that even though he disagreed with the verdict, jury nullification is there for a good reason and the jury was perfectly within protocol to do what they did. He's a nasty piece of work but every now and then comes across as surprisingly principled.
My favorite jury nullification story is of a murder case in Appalachia. Dude and his wife were walking out of a gas station. Other guy makes sexual and offensive statement about dude’s wife. Fight ensues. Dude ends up killing the guy who made the offensive comment.
Jury acquitted him “it don’t seem like you’d be any kinda man if you let somethin like that pass.”
We have jury trials for a reason. Sometimes the law as written needs to be interpreted by the people it serves.
On the two juries on which I’ve served, jury nullification was indirectly addressed by the judges who, in not so many words, claimed it was not legal for us to apply it.
Disingenuous and awful; there’s no wonder it exists when the judiciary thinks it can will it out of existence.
The whole notion that a court could require you to find a certain way is absurd. As a juror, your judgement outranks everyone else’s in the room.
I’m not some sovcit nutjob either, but someone who took standard US public school and university civics classes and paid close attention because it fascinated me.
Are you sure that's what the judges said? Judges do sometimes give instructions that are directly about jury nullification, but a lot of things that indirectly sound like they could be about nullification really aren't.
Remember that jury nullification, if you support it, is a very narrow exception to the general principle that juries are deciding facts rather than law. It would be an obvious miscarriage of justice if a juror tried to "nullify" the reasonable doubt standard because they think the defendant is guilty, or "nullify" some valid defense to the crime because they don't think the legislature should have included it.
I thought it was specifically some very lawyerly shenanigans that you couldn't legally talk about it while a juror in the course of your duties (without it being grounds for your dismissal from the jury) but they specifically couldn't stop you from engaging in it. Making the whole thing into an induction puzzle of sorts to leave the nullifier to persuade the others into a 'not guilty' without explicitly invoking the idea of jury nullification.
In the UK, there's a plaque at the Old Bailey court that specifically commemorates the right of juries to acquit a defendant according to the conscience of the jurors. Judges, oddly, aren't big fans of it.
It’s not legal. It’s an intentional perversion of the course of justice by the jury. But it’s something that cannot be prosecuted without impugning the independence of the jury.
It’s the entire reason for having a jury of your peers in the first place. We got tired of our countrymen being convicted of breaking another nation’s dumb laws, so we put a mechanism in place assuring that some has to be guilty in the eyes of their neighbors, not some distant government. Jury nullification is just about the most American thing I can imagine. Saying “I don’t care if he did it, it’s a dumb law and I’m not convicting him for it” is our birthright.
I have no idea how you got that from what I wrote. I never claimed, or thought, that America invented juries. Neither did we invent congresses or constitutions, but we also enacted them because we recognized them as good and useful ideas.
A quick way to be skipped over for jury duty is to bring up jury nullification during jury selection. Which I think is horrible, obviously. I was very excited to exercise my right to say presumptively possessing weed isn't worth jail time.
Can someone explain the legal concept in plain terms? I had thought a jury cannot be compelled to decide one or other way, and that jurors can vote as the will.
The general intent of the jury is to ask, "do you think they broke the law or not" and it's a jury of your peers, from your community, so it's seen as super fair.
On one extreme the jury carefully reviews the law as written and makes a judgement focused on the law. Whether they agree or disagree with the law itself is inconsequential, they must apply it.
On the other extreme (jury nullification) the jury might ignore the law and decide for themselves, then and there, what is right and what is wrong.
In many jurisdictions the jury is encouraged to adhere to the law as written, in some it is "illegal" for the jury to willfully ignore the law but there is no punishment for doing so. The concept of "Jury Nullification" is meant to be a checks & balances if some law exists that is insane or unreasonable or would be morally bankrupt to apply in a particular situation, extreme cases. So the pressure to not apply jury nullification in general is because if it were used in every case, not extreme cases, literally the jury then becomes the congress, the makers of law, and of course everything becomes kind of random and unfair depending on whatever jury you got.
You're being a bit disingenuous here. The legal system fears jury nullification because of precedent, and the complete clusterfuck a nullification makes of interpreting common law. Judges and lawyers basically have to ignore everything about that case. The case law, which is considered "discovered", has to be thrown out, because it'll make no sense otherwise. Stare decisis just doesn't make any sense in a nullification situation. This still doesn't mean nullification doesn't have a place. It is a check of the populace on a prosecutor/law enforcement with an agenda, a corrupt judge, or insane legislators/unconscionable laws. Nullification is the most important, and powerful democratic check on the judiciary available.
It's also a really bad idea to bank on getting. As voir dire (jury selection) is basically the prosecution devoting all their resources to make sure that they don't get a jury stacked with enough jurors willing to nullify. A judge might also declare a mistrial if they get a sense a nullification attempt is in the works or likely. A prosecutor may decline to prosecute, or petition for a change of venue if they get a sense the populace would just nullify anyway. Judges will tend to be very cross and threatening at the prospect, and will lecture at length about how bad it would be if you chose that path, etc.... etc.... It is very much the judicial equivalent of a vote of no confidence in the system, and the system hates being confronted with it.
Long story short, it's a populace's nuclear option with all the baggage that entails. It being employed is a signal that so much is wrong, the populace cannot conscionably allow the system to proceed as normal. It's a wake-up call to all three branches. Legislators that the law they passed may be unconscionable, the executive in that the People cannot endorse their execution of the laws as passed, and the judiciary, in that in no way shape or form can this randomly selected jury abide the status quo.
Jury is always advised by the Judge to follow the law(s) which will be explained to them. However, they do have power to decide that law(s) either do not apply or are not just. Though they will also be advised that going “your own way”
so-to-speak makes a compelling case in appeals court…
Specifically, the jury has the sole power to return a "guilty" verdict. If they return "not guilty", then the defendant is not guilty. There isn't any justification needed for why they returned that verdict -- just one word "guilty" or two words "not guilty".
Juries are meant to decide based on the case before them in accordance with the laws as written.
But jury discussions and motivations are sacrosanct, and you can't be punished for the "wrong" verdict. So technically you can ignore the law and vote how you like, allowing juries to effectively "nullify" a law by refusing to convict on it.
But allowing a jury to ignore the law as written means they can convict or not based solely on political leaning, ethnicity, sexuality or religion etc.
It's often cited as a way for society to oppose laws they disagree with, but is very much frowned upon by the legal system as it is easily exploited for very nefarious purposes and leads to a very unbalanced system rather than a consistent rule of law.
To read how it is applied today in the us, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Un...