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.
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"?
The thing is, no one can do a single thing to stop it... and that's what conservatives need to know... that they can put a "dead stop" to any law that is oppressive or unjust.
I say, "Get the word out" and make sure conservatives know you can do that.
What if a city passed a law banning the ownership of firearms for any reason? Based on your argument, a jury would have to convict a defendant because that was the law.
Why shouldn’t a jury acquit the person in spite of the judge’s instructions?
One of the main purposes of juries is so that there is a way for society to restrain the exercise of unfettered power by the state.