[Peace-discuss] Jury Nullification

[E. Wayne Johnson]

The local community sets its standards for justice/injustice based upon 
its values.
That is actually a pretty good thing.  TV and Mass media has attempted to
standardize culture and values across the country.   I can't imagine how 
that can be good.

Connecticut might with validity forbid activities that Kentucky with 
equal validity allows.  Saline county and Lake county, both
in Illinois are populated by very different people with different 
lifestyles and goals.  They can decide what is just and unjust in
their locales.  Jury nullification tends to erode central control of 
values and permit local interpretations
of what is a desirable lifestyle.  It favours grassroots governance.

It seems to me that all of the items you list below are instances of 
jury nullification.

There is nothing that says that the 12 people on a jury have to agree on 
the verdict.
They have to agree in order to convict, but they don't have to agree.

Ron Szoke wrote:
> I'm still not clear how one can draw the distinction between a misapplication of 
> the law and a direct appeal to the jury's intuitions about injustice.  
>
> The classic formulation is that a jury of peers represents "the conscience of the 
> community," I believe, which is how some obscenity prosecutions by politically 
> ambitious prosecutors are derailed.  
>
> Less politically freighted are some euthanasia cases, as in a few early cases 
> involving Dr. Kervokian, it seems, where there was a murder charge, but the 
> jury decides that it was a mercy to end the pain & suffering in certain terminal 
> & hopeless cases, & so acquits.  
>
> Also in point are some putative murder cases I've heard about in which a 
> horribly deformed baby is born & is immediately killed by a parent, apparently 
> in the belief that the newborn will soon die anyway, & could never possibly  
> have anything approaching a normal human life even if it did survive.   
> Reportedly, in some such cases the jury has refused to convict, tho there is no 
> doubt  that the defendant actually did what he is charged with doing.  
>
> Are these cases of jury nullification, & what conclusion do we draw from that?
>
> -- Ron
>
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