[Publius Valerius]

It’s not due process to decide to convict someone because you don’t like his hairstyle. While there is some utility to the concept of jury nullification—and I emphasize some—this notion that juries can do as they please subverts the concept of due process upon which our criminal justice system is based.

[antiRepublicrat]

this notion that juries can do as they please subverts the concept of due process upon which our criminal justice system is based

Jury nullification helped create the system. Before that, juries basically had to rule whatever way the judge told them to. Jury nullification created the concept that jurors could rule in accordance with their own consciences. Such was the accepted case until the government powers started to crack down on this power of the people in the late 1800s.

[bvw]

That’s not right. It is due process. We weigh ALL in front of us. The Jury system keeps the citizens involved in the whole system of law and justice, it raises expectations and by so doing makes better citizens. The modern — perverted — system where citizens coming into juries are treated like trash is the real abuse of due process. Of course juries so treated — and so selected — act irresponsibly. Every narrowing instruction to them tells them they are viewed as imbeciles.

Judges ALSO make determinations of guilt or innocence based on personal appearance, as do police, detectives and prosecutors. Human nature. The trick is to have a culture — a courtroom culture — that empowers responsibility.

When the citizens are cut out and debased, we are left with an autocracy running all legal process — and that autocracy itself becomes corrupted and debased. Look ate the 111th Congress — it was full of lawyers. Look at the judicial tyrants now afflicting our courts.

[zeugma]

I'm as strong an advocate of Jury Nullification as anyone, but I think part of the confusion on this comes from the more flippant response of voting based on 'hairstyle' or some other such nonsense (I'm guilty of making similar remarks in the past). I think the founders quotes referenced previously really narrow down the scope of the right of the juror quite well. The juror has the absolute and inviolate right to judge both the facts of the case, and the law itself. That is its bounds, but those bounds are quite broad. The prosecution may prove its case as convincingly as anything you can imagine, but if the law itself is unjust in the mind of the juror, he may vote to acquit.

Those who bring up O.J. as an indictment of the right of jury nullification fail to acknowledge that the case is a clear perversion of it. I seriously doubt anyone on the jury would publicly state that laws against murder are unjust. They may have reason to believe that prosecutorial misconduct has led to the accusation being lodged against an innocent man, but then, you've left the realm of jury nullification.

I strongly recommend that each of us take part when called up to serve on a jury. As citizens, it is a solemn duty, because it is our one chance to actually judge the law itself as well as the accused.