OK, so if you decide there's a conflict, and that it would be unconstitutional for you to keep your juror's oath, do you go ahead and take that sacred oath, with the full intention of breaking it?
Or, in other words, your personal determination that a law is unconstitutional then gives you license to raise your right hand and lie to the judge, in the name of God?
The Constitution is neither long nor complex. What are long and complex are the illegitimate rationalizations used by violators to justify their actions.
You didn't answer my question.
Here it is again:
Are you comfortable with 12 random people making that judgment? Do you think they know the Constitution well enough to say one way or the other?
It is not up to a juror to decide whether a law is unconstitutional. That isn’t what jury nullification is all about anyway.Jury nullification is supposed to be about restorative justice, thwarting the system because the system is unjust in the minds of the certain people. They feel that although the in reality, the accused may be guilty, that since others have paid a price unjustly, they will let the present guilty person off instead. According to the meta narrative of restorative justice and liberation theology, a member of a minority cannot be held guilty of any crime under the system except failing to rebel against the white capitalist system.
If one takes the oath prior to the government's presentation of its case, how could one know whether or not the government would act lawfully?
All citizens have a duty to uphold the Constitution. Naturalized citizens and members of the military are bound by oath; other citizens are not bound by oath but still have such a duty.
Are you comfortable with 12 random people making that judgment? Do you think they know the Constitution well enough to say one way or the other?
On some issues, no. On some other issues, however, I would expect judges to be wrong most of the time, and jurors should serve as a backstop.
For example, the Fourth Amendment explicitly forbids unreasonable searches and seizures. To be legitimate, a search must be conducted in reasonable fashion. A typical judge, asked if a search is "reasonable", will look at whether anyone has managed to rationalize as reasonable any sort of search vaguely similar to the one at hand. An ordinary citizen, on the other hand, would be more likely to simply look at whether the search was in fact reasonable.
To be sure, there won't always be agreement about what's reasonable, but some cops engage in conduct which may vaguely resemble "reasonable" behavior but is nonetheless clearly unreasonable. Jurors, if allowed the chance, might correctly recognize that sometimes the cops are the robbers.