Against jury nullification


Libertarian blogger and fellow Arizonian has an unusual view

Warren Meyer made a strong argument against jury nullification at Coyote Blog. That's surprising for a libertarian. Emphasis in original.

Anyway, as you might imagine, the libertarians in the room mostly love jury nullification.  Despite being a good anarcho-capitalist, I disagreed. I understood that most of the examples people brought up did indeed demonstrate that jury nullification could be a tool for protecting individual rights.  However, I believe that nullification could equally be a tool of oppression.  For example, in criminal law, take the Enron-Skilling trial.  I am not saying this happened, but one could certainly imagine a properly inflamed jury saying "well, we don't think he is technically guilty beyond a reasonable doubt on the charges based on the evidence here in court, but he's rich and Enron failed and people lost money and we're pissed off, so we will find him guilty.  They would be saying "what he did was not a violation of the law, but it should be, so we are sending him to jail." This is just as much jury nullification as my previous example.

I don't necessarily agree, but it is certainly worth thinking about.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Fri - March 2, 2007 at 04:47 AM  Tag


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