Reddit links, there are a lot of lame ones, and the perspective of the posters often seems predictable. Just today I read a massively upvoted link complaining about old people not dying off fast enough. There definitely are cool things found there though. I found this youtube video through reddit weeks before I had to report for jury duty. It’s not really worth watching, just some officials outside a courthouse harassing some FIJA(Fully Informed Jury Association) fans that were passing out informational pamphlets. I didn’t pay a whole bunch of attention to it. Of course, then I approach the county courthouse the morning of reporting for jury duty and there are folks there handing out the same materials. No one was harassing them, and I thanked them for the information and read it. It is definitely interesting stuff, and I can see how it would be upsetting to some people. FIJA advocates jurors to not simply judge whether someone is guilty or innocent of the stated law, but to judge also the law itself if need be.
I decided to write about this because of the River Cities’ Reader article I read recently entitled “A Law Unto Themselves”: Jury Nullification and the Deck Stacked Against It and also my recent experience serving as a juror. This was my first time actually serving as a juror. I was previously called to the Federal Building on 4th St. in Davenport to serve, but during voir dire I was stricken from the pool by the prosecuting attorneys. It was a drug conspiracy case involving 92 pounds of marijuana. The prosecuting attorneys asked if anyone in the jury pool thought marijuana should be legalized. Besides me only one other person raised their hand. I presume they struck me on those grounds, which was a relief to me because I didn’t want to be on the jury. It wasn’t just an excuse, because I do think it should be legalized for recreational use. That belief certainly wouldn’t have affected my judging the facts of the case in that instance though. At that time I wasn’t even aware of jury nullification, but in retrospect, I really think I wouldn’t have used nullification as a tool in that specific case. Sure I think marijuana should be legalized, but this wasn’t an individual with a user’s amount of marijuana, this was 92 pounds of the stuff, and this business is costing people their lives in Mexico. So far, according to this L.A. Times page, there are 22,700 drug-related deaths since January of 2007. Obviously illegal purchasers contribute to this problem, but nullification would have been a more likely candidate in a simple marijuana possession case depending on the penalties involved.
That brings me to my more recent experiences, of actually serving on a jury. I won’t talk about any particulars of this one, but I will say that when I went into the jury pool with over a hundred other people, I understood jury nullification and was prepared to use it as a tool. That meant that if I had a problem with the law itself or the consequences of breaking that law I would could consider jury nullification. The River Cities’ Reader article quotes a law professor saying “Courts recently have been reluctant to encourage jury nullification, and in fact have taken several steps to prevent it. In most jurisdictions, judges instruct jurors that it is their duty to apply the law as it is given to them, whether they agree with the law or not”. In fact the judge in my case addressed the whole jury pool this way saying that we can’t use jury nullification as a tool. I took that with a grain of salt. It turned out that I didn’t particularly disagree with the justice of that specific law, or the application of it, so I was free to judge the facts of the case like a normal juror. Initially I pondered answering some jury pool questions in such a way that I would likely be stricken, but then I thought it would be simply shirking what little civic responsibility I had. I also felt that if I was on trial, I would appreciate having a jury equipped with jury nullification as a tool.
The problem with jury nullification, like the River Cities’ Reader article points out, is that it can be a double-edged sword. It was used in the 1800s to acquit individuals accused of harboring slaves, but also used to acquit white supremacists of racist killings of which there was ample evidence of. True jury nullification would have the whole jury refusing to convict based on a judgment of a bad law instead of the facts of the case. But just one juror doing so may simply result in a hung jury, in which the defendant may be tried again at a later date. A competent juror that holds jury nullification as a potential tool is no threat to justice. What can be a threat to justice is simply an incompetent juror regardless of any potential jury nullification ideas. A jury of our peers may indeed include individuals that do not fully understand the different counts of criminal charges one is accused of. It may include individuals that don’t understand what “beyond a reasonable doubt” means. Prejudices do come into play, as well as preconceived notions based on what some see on fictional television police dramas. David Caruso wouldn’t have done it that way, so I say “not guilty”. Some individuals simply aren’t courageous enough to find somebody guilty, grasping desperately onto any possible doubt, conspiracy theory, and fabricated scenario. I think a fully informed juror is a good thing, and in the grand scheme of things, nothing to sweat over.
