[Peace-discuss] Jury Nullification]

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Tom Tindle from Evansville Indiana wrote to me advising that Jury 
Nullification is hardwired into Article I Section 19 of
the Indiana Constitution (Bill of Rights): 

/Section 19. In all criminal cases whatever, the jury shall have the 
right to determine the law and the facts.
/
(Upheld in Holliday v. State 257N.E.579, 1970)

*


Here are some other quotes:

U.S. v. WILSON (629 F.2d 439, 443 (6th Cir. 1980): "In criminal cases, a 
jury is entitled to acquit the defendant because it has no sympathy for 
the government's position."

STEVEN E. BARKAN ("Jury Nullification in Political Trials," Social 
Problems, 31, No. 1, 38, October 1983): "Jury acquittals in the 
colonial, abolitionist, and post-bellum eras of the United States helped 
advance insurgent aims and hamper government efforts at social control. 
Wide spread jury acquittals or hung juries during the Vietnam War might 
have had the same effect. But the refusal of judges in trials of anti 
war protesters to inform juries of their power to disregard the law 
helped ensure convictions, which in turn frustrated anti war goals and 
protected the government from the many repercussions that acquittals or 
hung juries would have brought."

U.S. vs. DOUGHERTY (1972) [D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals]: The jury 
has...."unreviewable and irreversible power...to acquit in disregard of 
the instructions on the law given by the trial judge."

Justice BYRON WHITE (Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 US 145, 155 (1968)): "A 
right to jury trial is granted to criminal defendants in order to 
prevent oppression by the Government."

Justice BYRON WHITE (Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 US 145, 156 (1968)): 
"Those who wrote our constitutions knew from history and experience that 
it was necessary to protect against unfounded criminal charges brought 
to eliminate enemies and against judges too responsive to the voice of 
higher authority."

Justice BYRON WHITE (Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 US 145, 156 (1968)): 
"Providing an accused with the right to be tried by a jury of his peers 
gave him an inestimable safeguard against the corrupt or overzealous 
prosecutor and against the compliant, biased, or eccentric judge. If the 
defendant preferred the common-sense judgment of a jury to the more 
tutored but perhaps less sympathetic reaction of the single judge, he 
was to have it."

Justice BYRON WHITE (Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 US 522, 530 (1975)): "The 
purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power -- 
to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge 
against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the 
professional or perhaps overconditioned or biased response of a judge."


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.chambana.net/mailman/archive/peace-discuss/attachments/20090203/f8296f66/attachment.htm