The Power of Juries

When it comes to legal remedies against bad laws and abuse of government power, one widely overlooked nonviolent weapon we have in our legal arsenal is the jury system. For a law to have effect, it must be enforced. For the law to be enforced (at least for the time being), people must be convicted. And in our system, that means a jury has to make the decision. Thus juries - citizen panels who are presumed to have common sense - are a sort-of safety valve in the process, who are charged with both protecting society from evil, and protecting the innocent from prosecution.

But judges often bully juries and tell them that they are not allowed to consider this or that, or that they may not ponder whether the law is good or bad, or whether or not the punishment would be just. This is all nonsense. A juror can vote however he wants for any reason. The whole point of a jury is to have ordinary citizens make decisions based on common sense. They are not mere rubber stamps of the judge or the state - for that defeats the purpose of the jury system!

In fact, in Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence, there is a long and honorable tradition of Jury Nullification.

When bad laws are routinely nullified by juries, eventually the legislators get the picture and either repeal the bad laws, or rewrite them to make them more just. Jury nullification is a check and balance against bad law - which exists in democracies and republics just as surely as it is found in monarchies and dictatorships.

Three hundred years ago, one such case involved William Penn and the freedom to practice his religion (Quakerism) in England. He was obviously guilty. The law was clear. The jury was instructed to find Penn and his co-defendant guilty. Several jurors refused to convict (because they felt the law was unjust and violated freedom of religion - which should have trumped the law), thus hanging the jury. The jurors who refused to convict were in turn treated like criminals, and pressured to change their minds. In those days, jurors could be arrested and tortured for not voting the way the state wanted them to vote - which defeats the very purpose of the jury system.

Here is a snippet from the above-mentioned Wikipedia article:

By the late 17th century, the court's ability to punish juries was removed in Bushell's Case involving a juror on the case against William Penn. Penn and William Mead had been arrested in 1670 for illegally preaching a Quaker sermon and disturbing the peace, but four jurors, led by Edward Bushell refused to find them guilty. Instead of dismissing the jury, the judge sent them back for further deliberations. Despite the judge demanding a guilty verdict, the jury this time unanimously found Penn guilty of preaching but acquitted him on the charge of disturbing the peace and acquitted Mead of all charges. The jury was then subsequently kept for three days without "meat, drink, fire and tobacco" to force them to bring in a guilty verdict and when they failed to do so the judge ended the trial. As punishment the judge ordered the jurors imprisoned until they paid a fine to the court. Four jurors refused to pay the fine and after several months, Edward Bushell sought a writ of habeas corpus. Chief Justice Vaughan, sitting on the Court of Common Pleas, discharged the writ, released them, called the power to punish a jury "absurd" and forbade judges from punishing jurors for returning a verdict the judge disagreed with.

Jury nullification has been used in the United States to work towards the abolition of slavery and to end racially biased laws, to beat back governmental abuse in laws against criticizing the president (the Alien and Sedition Acts) that were passed under the John Adams administration, and was instrumental in eventually repealing the amendment that turned beer and wine into illegal drugs (prohibition).

In this day and age where government seems to be getting more and more powerful, increasingly arbitrary, and where civil courts (where the burden of proof is lower) are increasingly replacing criminal courts to assess fines - which sometimes are preposterous - jury nullification is a way to restore sanity to a system gone mad. Think of how many times you read in the paper about someone being denied justice, people receiving ridiculous sentences, even situations where people are convicted and given long sentences for protecting themselves from attack - and think of how you could have sent a message by being on the jury and saying "no." Often jurors are all but ordered to vote for conviction. They simply don't know what their rights and responsibilities are. Judges routinely ignore or even misinform jurors about their common-sense safety-valve role in the system.

How often we hear jurors saying that they did not want to convict, but felt they had to vote one way or the other! These people actually believe they are the state's rubber stamp instead of an independent citizen review board to ensure the system is fair and equitable. That's what a jury truly is.

And with the coming juggernaut of nationalized health care - which includes provisions of enforcement of jail and fines against nonconformists and refuseniks - liberty-loving Americans would do well to be informed of their rights as jurors and to be fully informed about the power they have as jurors to impact bad law - or at very least, shield individuals from being victimized by a government that has gone off the rails.

In fact, there is an organization called the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) that seeks to educate the American people regarding their rights and responsibilities as citizen-jurors.

The whole point of a jury system is to inject common sense into a system dominated by arcane legal argument, political taint, and the corrupting influence of money. Unfortunately, lawyers, politicians, and moneyed interests - empowered by judges - have all but turned juries into rubber stamps.

You are not a rubber stamp!