Ever been called upon to perform jury duty?  It’s been said that only stupid people can’t escape Jury duty.  All you really have to do is proclaim a general distrust of black people if the defendant is black, a distrust of natives if the defendant is native and so on.  If you find yourself in a tough spot and the defendant is white, you can just tell em you think they’re definitely guilty because the police only arrest guilty people.  You’d be hard pressed to find a defence attorney that would agree to have you on the jury judging the merits of their client’s case and eventually, they’ll just send you home.

There are of course other people like me who would be thrilled to be on a jury.  Yes I hate government and I think the courts are generally fraudulent and coercive organizations that exorcise intimidation and pretend authority over sovereign human beings, (just like government) but despite that, I would absolutely be thrilled to be on a jury.  Why?

Did you know a jury can nullify charges against some one if the Jury feels it is justified?  Even an axe murderer can be let off scott free if the jury thinks he/she should be.  How cool is that?  Well it would be really cool aside from a simple detail.  No one in the court room is allowed to tell the Jury they have this option.  Not the judge, not the defence, not the prosecutor; not a single soul can tell the jury members that they can nullify the charges at any time they so desire.  It is true that in fact the vast majority of those eligible for jury duty have no idea that this power even exists and so even in cases where some one commits a crime for the most compassionate of reasons, a jury believes it is not allowed to do anything but find the defendant guilty.

I would love to have the opportunity to educate a jury.

Luckily, there are people here and there who figure out that juries do have the power of jury nullification.  A jury in La Salle County for instance was put in the position of casting judgement on a Vietnam war vet who possessed a whole schwack of cannabis.  The guy had bad knees and a whole lotta pain…you know, some one who’s generally not the kind of guy you envision speeding off in a sports car to meet with his drug lord friends or what not.  So the Jury decided that the guy wasn’t much of a threat, deserved to smoke his pot in peace and shazam, they nullified his charges.

Jury nullification is such a neat power and it would be great if more people knew about it.  What I don’t really understand is why juries can’t be notified about this option in court.  They just kind of have to find out about it for themselves.  Doesn’t that seem a little unfair to keep the jury partially in the dark like that?  Doesn’t it seem kind of anti-justice to actively try to keep the jury from knowing about a tool that they have available?

Of course it is anti-justice but then it would be a lot harder for government to function with such absolute authority if the citizenship were more readily aware of its power to render the laws of the ruling buffoons irrelevant.