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To: AnAmericanMother

I thought that part was a bit odd myself.

Personally, I think I would not put my trust in a judicial panel who so readily dismissed the jury’s perrogative to be both the judge of both the facts and the law by claiming it is a dangerous principle. Even more dangerous is a judiciary that claims only a judge can rule on matters of law and that the jury must blindly accept what he says.


157 posted on 04/29/2010 5:53:03 PM PDT by SeaHawkFan
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To: SeaHawkFan
I'm sorry, but jury nullification is an extremely dangerous principle.

The idea that jurors can simply ignore the law and do what they think is "right" sounds facially appealing . . . but who decides what is "right"? What if you have twelve different ideas of what is "right"?

I'm afraid that in many cases "right" amounts to "I sympathize with this defendant and think he should get off", or alternatively, "I think this defendant is scum and he should go to jail, if not for this, then for something else he probably did and didn't get caught." The jury instructions exist to provide a borderline to stop sympathetic or antagonistic jurors from deciding cases on emotion rather than law.

If a law is bad, the place to go is an appeal if there are constitutional grounds, or to your legislator and get it overturned. By the way, getting a law overturned legislatively will almost always result in reversals on appeal for folks who got convicted before the law was changed. The Wilson case here was a good example of that - a badly drafted child molestation statute accidentally mandated hard time for teenage heavy petting . . . . Wilson was a horribly unsympathetic defendant but they still changed the law and his conviction was reversed.

As a practical matter, the sympathetic defendant would get off on nullification < cough, cough O.J. cough, cough > while the less appealing defendant would get slammed.

That is essentially what has always happened under the French or Continental system, where the idea is that prosecutor, defense attorney and judge are all 'seeking the truth' rather than the English system of two lawyers fighting to the last ditch and stone wall for their man, with the judge to see fair play under the law. An abstract search for 'truth' by all concerned has the opposite effect from what you would expect -- the Dreyfus case is the usual example.

163 posted on 04/29/2010 6:19:05 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother (Ministrix of ye Chasse, TTGC Ladies' Auxiliary (recess appointment)T)
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