Jury Nullification: Power, Impact and Controversy

At trial, your life is in the palms of strangers who decide your fate to walk free or be sentenced and charged with a crime. Juries and judges are the main components of trials and differ at both the state and federal level. A respectable citizen selected for jury duty can determine whether the evidence presented was doubtfully valid enough to convict someone without full knowledge of the criminal justice system or the elements of a trial. In this paper, juries and their powers will be analyzed, relevant cases pertaining to jury nullification will be expanded and evaluated, the media’s part on juries discretion, and finally the instructions judges give or may not include for juries in the court.

Introduction Juries are a vital

It is considered to be inconsistent with the jury 's duty to return a verdict based solely on the law and the facts of the case. The jury does not have a right to nullification, and counsel is not permitted to present the concept of jury nullification to the jury. However, jury verdicts of acquittal are unassailable even where the verdict is inconsistent with the weight of the evidence and instruction of the law. Jury nullification takes place when jurors acquit a defendant who is factually guilty because they disagree with the law as written. Jury nullification also occurs when a jury convicts a defendant because it condemns the defendant or his actions, even though the evidence at trial showed that he technically didn’t break any law. For example, all-white juries in the post-civil war South routinely convicted black defendants accused of sex crimes against white women despite minimal evidence of guilt (Streicker, 2014). Jury nullification only affects a single case in which it is used in, not the actual law. A consistent pattern of acquittals for prosecutions of a certain offense can have the practical effect of invalidating a law, therefore leading the Supreme Court to alter a law or implement a new

From the Ferguson, Missouri case of an officer “wrongfully” protecting himself to the Texas DWI case involving the father murdering the murderer of his sons, the media helps play a larger role on the scale to emphasize more attraction to the topic of the moment. With the increasing complexity and reach of the law, to nullify is to be a useful tool in a democratic society. However, a verdict should be based on the law as decided by the whole people, not the few who make up the jury of a particular case. Although judges and legal scholars take a variety of positions of the subject of jury nullification, the validity of the practice is said to follow logically from several aspects of our judicial system. In the general, judges are unwilling in most states to even inform juries the option of