Posted on 04/15/2014 12:03:29 PM PDT by george76
Advocates of jury nullification did their best to improve a bill expanding a jury’s ability to nullify laws, but the bill won’t be making it to a vote this session.
House Bill 316, a bill by North Pole Republican Rep. Tammie Wilson, would expand and protect a jury’s right to judge the merits of a law, not just the facts before them, in a criminal case.
The bill would allow defendants to argue their case based merits of the law, encouraging jurors to find them not guilty even in cases where evidence shows otherwise. It also would bar judges from dismissing jurors who support nullification.
Currently, jury nullification is technically legal, but jurors are often dismissed and attempting to advocate for it can end in jury tampering charges.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsminer.com ...
Nullification huh? I have seen it before HERE.
Perfect example :
An 18-month federal probe into one of Baltimore's most racially sensitive homicide cases ended yesterday when prosecutors decided not to pursue a civil rights indictment against an African-American man acquitted of killing Korean-American student Joel J. Lee.
The decision disappointed Lee's father and Asian-American leaders, who were outraged in 1995 when a nearly all-black jury acquitted Davon Neverdon. Neverdon was found not guilty despite testimony from four witnesses who said they saw him shoot Lee in the face during a $20 mugging in Northeast Baltimore.
U.S. ends rights probe in Lee death Evidence in slaying considered too weak for federal indictment January 16, 1997 Balt Sun
It’s already the LAW, one we brought over from merry old England; and possibly before....
An example of racism, maybe, but not nullification.
Here's another
To protest this senseless and very expensive mass incarceration, I call for “Martin Luther King jurors.” They would engage in strategic jury nullification designed to safely reduce the number of people in prison for non-violent drug crimes, and to send the message that “we the people” ain’t gonna take it anymore. Like the “creative disobedience” that Martin Luther King used to advance civil rights, strategic nullification would be a powerful call for change.
My proposal is that Martin Luther King jurors vote “not guilty” in cases in which a defendant is accused of possessing drugs for his or her own use, or selling a small quantity of drugs to another consenting adult. In cases of violent crime, or selling drugs to minors, jurors should convict, if they are persuaded beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty.
Jury Nullification: Power To The People (April 15, 2014, Prison Legal News)
How about Jury nullification to decide deportations, in LA too? I am sure that would work great.
“They pointed out to me that with assaults and homicides there had never been an American Indian who wasn’t convicted and there had never been a Caucasian who was,” he said. “That is jury nullification.”
No, that is a false argument. Jury nullification can *only* result in acquittal, by rejecting the premise of the law. A jury *cannot* make a conviction that a judge cannot overturn, unless he is asserting that the judges that heard those cases were also racists.
After a jury convicts, a judge may decide that based on the merits of the case, the jury reached the wrong verdict, so he can declare the defendant not guilty. But if the jury acquits, he cannot on his own determine that the defendant is guilty, or direct the jury to find the defendant guilty.
So it sounds like this prosecutor is not entirely honest in his opposition to jury nullification.
An important note is that during Prohibition, juries often refused to convict rum-runners; so eventually judges started to issue *injunctions* against the rum-runners, that prevented them from doing business. If they violated the injunction, they would be hauled before the judge *without* a jury, and found guilty of contempt of court, then put in jail.
Such injunctions are still infrequently used to bust up street gangs.
But it goes to show how much prosecutors and judges want to “direct convictions”, even if juries do not want to convict.
Jury nullification can already happen in any state, so long as no juror admits his reasons for voting not guilty were that he’s against the law that was violated.
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