the whole point of a jury is to allow the people to decide the law on individual cases. There are many problems with juries, but complaining about jury nullification just means you don't like the good parts of having a jury.
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All the best to Luigi. Good luck to him.
Jury nullification is the term for when a jury declines to convict a defendant despite overwhelming evidence of guilt. This can be a form of civil disobedience, a political statement against a specific law, or a show of empathy and support to the defendant.
“It’s not a legal defense sanctioned under the law,” said Cheryl Bader, associate professor of law at Fordham School of Law. “It’s a reaction by the jury to a legal result that they feel would be so unjust or morally wrong that they refuse to impose it, despite what the law says.”
Over the centuries, American juries have nullified cases related to controversial topics like fugitive slave laws, Prohibition and, in recent decades, the war on drugs.
Giggity.
Jury nullification is also why cops who murder people and klansmen get acquitted. It's not necessarily a good thing, just a quirk of the system.
It's not some minor quirk of the system. It's the only reason we have juries at all. If you just wanted a group of 12 people to decide guilt and innocence based on the facts of the case and the letter of the law, you would never hire 12 random untrained nobodies for that purpose. If that is all juries were for, you would have professional juries; being a juror would be a career that required a law degree.
We have juries to protect against corrupt laws. That is the only saving grace of having guilt and innocence be decided by 12 random untrained nobodies. Legislatures can become corrupted and end up criminalizing things that the vast majority of the population does not consider to be wrong. A jury of your peers is the last line of defense against corrupt laws. And this mechanism is the only reason we have juries like we do.
Juries also have acquitted some abused women who killed or attacked their husbands, such as Francine Hughes, leading to a wider recognition of what’s known as battered woman syndrome.
“Juries recognized that before the law did,” Conrad said. “The law is slow to change. Sometimes society changes much more quickly than the law, and that is when jury nullification should come in … We don’t need to have 18th-century law governing 21st-century behavior, and the jury can say so.”
New phrase added to the American lexicon in 2025 - battered patient syndrome.
“This is not a case of (Mangione) like throwing blood on this guy as he’s walking into the convention,” Bader said, referring to the scene of the shooting outside an investors’ conference in Midtown Manhattan. “If the jury finds that there’s evidence that he ended this man’s life in cold blood, I don’t see the result being an acquittal because of anger toward the health insurance system.”
Dumbass
I don't see the result being acquittal because of the anger toward the health insurance system.
Feels like Mr. Bader himself might be a little out of touch with just how bad the health insurance system is.
Its hard for rich people to understand. I have no sympathy for their predicament
He’s not guilty of murder. These people just can’t wrap their head around a jury NOT convicting someone with a lot of evidence but never seem to care about convicting people WITHOUT much evidence. Clutch your pearls all you want, if he is found not guilty there are gonna be more not-guilty people.
Please, please, god don't put me on the jury. I would hate to hold a murderer accountable for getting in the way of an innocent man's bullets.
I've been on a jury in the last little place I lived and you better believe they made sure it was all employed older white people against a young black man. I was the youngest on at 28. What they did to me is made me sit in a room with these, some probably decent, people, while one guy just talked and talked and lied and told fake stories like long discredited shit while a bunch were like oh yeah and I remember.
Fucking makes me sick. Sick at myself that I was such a little shit at that age that I didn't tell the old prick to shut the fuck up and stop lying. But what really makes me sick was after sitting in a room for hours with these people is the state's house slave walks in with cops and says we just walked the guy by, showed him who was going to convict him, and he took the plea deal. Fucking gross. Don't believe your fucking TV this is how most cases go.
Not guilty of a crime as stated by a jury of his peers. Has the legal ramification of nullifying laws that a jury says are unjust. It is literally THE last bastion of hope US citizens have for undoing criminal laws.
Well, there's one more box after jury box.
Really hope this is fully televised.
Nah, the topic of the month is going to be Trump declaring war on Mongolia because UFOs and Jewish Space Lasers.
Can't have the plebs talking about real issues.
Why the hell is CNN charging a subscription now? Are people really stupid enough to pay it?