Jury Nullification and your power to nullify

Jury Nullification and your power to nullify
Seems judges and prosecutors abhor this principle of law so it has been kept quiet in the courts.Read about it and get the word out.

The USA is a police state after all. And imprisons more people than any other state in the whole fucking world. The citizen needs all the ammunition that is available to them.

If it is unknown then it is a lost right of the masses.

Jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a verdict of "Not Guilty" despite its belief that the defendant is guilty of the violation charged. The jury in effect nullifies a law that it believes is either immoral or wrongly applied to the defendant whose fate they are charged with deciding.

In the early 1800s, nullification was practiced in cases brought under the Alien and Sedition Act. In the mid 1800s, northern juries practiced nullification in prosecutions brought against individuals accused of harboring slaves in violation of the Fugitive Slave Laws. And in the Prohibition Era of the 1930s, many juries practiced nullification in prosecutions brought against individuals accused of violating alcohol control laws.

Early in our history, judges often informed jurors of their nullification right. For example, our first Chief Justice, John Jay, told jurors: "You have a right to take upon yourselves to judge ." In 1805, one of the charges against Justice Samuel Chase in his impeachment trial was that he wrongly prevented an attorney from arguing to a jury that the law should not be followed.

Judicial acceptance of nullification began to wane, however, in the late 1800s. In 1895, in United States v Sparf, the U. S. Supreme Court voted 7 to 2 to uphold the conviction in a case in which the trial judge refused the defense attorney's request to let the jury know of their nullification power.

Judges have worried that informing jurors of their power to nullify will lead to jury anarchy, with jurors following their own sympathies. They suggest that informing of the power to nullify will increase the number of hung juries. Some judges also have pointed out that jury nullification has had both positive and negative applications--the negative applications including some notorious cases in which all-white southern juries in the 1950s and 1960s refused to convict white supremacists for killing blacks or civil rights workers despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/nullification.html

bad idea.

Sorry.

population in the world. Is that a good thing?

I am convinced that the large numbers of prisons and the large numbers of inmates is merely for job creation at the expense of a real justice system.

jury nullification?

It's the same problem as with the attempts to give states the ability to nullify federal law.

Do you really trust a jury loaded with teabaggers or "sovereign citizens" with this power?

sovereign citizen votes?

it is, if you know what vote requirements are in criminal cases.

How in the world do you get that from anything I have said?

What a stupid strawman argument.

a criminal case have to be the same?

Your replies are leaving me puzzled.

have you ever heard of a hung jury?

"Do you think my vote as a juror is dependent on how a fellow juror teabagger or

sovereign citizen votes?"

You said, "Yeah...

it is, if you know what vote requirements are in criminal cases."

So...... What did you mean.

Do you mean to say that Teabaggers and sovereign citizens can control how a juror votes?

this is getting absurd and the proximate cause is your lack of awareness as to how our legal system works.

Let's say that a "Sovereign Citizen" is on trial for 1st degree murder. Despite the fact that you and 10 of your fellow jurors have no doubt of the guilt of the defendant, totally unbeknownst to you, the juror 12 is a stealth "Sovereign Citizen" and, despite knowing the defendant is guilty, is a holdout. Since a number of crimes require a unanimous verdict for conviction, this SC juror has just effectivly nullified your and the other jurors vote.

Still think jury nullification is cool?

How do you come to the conclusion that Jury nullification is the reason for a hung jury?

Or do you think that jury nullification is always the cause for hung juries?

nevermind.

It's a really bad idea, with all kinds of potential to derail our justice system. And, I don't remotely believe the United States is a "police state".

"or" is a word, it slid by spellcheck.

Maybe I can hope for jury nullification.

Prosecutors claim they could not get a conviction from an impartial jury,
and therefore must disqualify anyone who is not pro-death penalty.
It is a travesty of justice.

slavery and prohibition?

Really?

there were laws against hiding and aiding runaway slaves. In the northern states, the Juries stopped convicting those charged under these laws. Eventually this led to the end of slavery, in the United States.

The same thing happened with the laws against alcohol. Prohibition was eventually repealed due to the fact Juries were reluctant to convict those who violated prohibition laws.

(Hope this helps)

"end" either thing.

You might have heard of the Civil War and the 21st amendment.

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In theory, of course, it can go anywhere you can get twelve Americans to go, but the current criminal justice system currently does such an awful job that it's easy to improve on it.

But personally I think EVERYBODY who is both mentally competent and not involved in the case should be obligated to perform jury duty, and neither prosecution nor defense should have the right to reject jurors, especially for being smart, competent, or aware.

In the noted cases where all-white juries refused to convict white perps, this was obviously a society-wide problem, compounded by unfair jury selection procedures that resulted in biased juries. Somehow I doubt that a half-black jury would have ruled the same way in the civil rights cases.

So, jury nullification definitely works better if juries aren't selected for ignorance to the degree that they currently are. So that's another problem to fix, not a fixed aspect of the universe that condemns jury nullification to failure

http://homepage.smc.edu/sindell_steven/AJ3%20Folder/Currentevents/aj3.jury.nullific.html

And even where other state constitutions seem to imply it is legal, the relevant circuit courts have ruled against it.
The problem for enforcement against jury nullification I guess, is that once a person is found not guilty, a judge cannot find them guilty; and juries don't have to reveal why they found a person not guilty, so enforcement is pretty much impossible against those who practice jury nullification.

Jurors are in fact, routinely kicked off juries if they make it known that they won't uphold their oath make their decisions in accordance with the law.

And frankly, people are routinely arrested for pushing jury nullification.

"The court acknowledged that in criminal cases, juries may continue to nullify the law unless the judge discovers it before a verdict."

idea.