OH YEAH THEYRE TALKING ABOUT IT NOW
Please do not remove mods, really sorry for the Google AMP link, but this is a “subscribers only” blocked article on CNN that for some reason AMP just straight up bypasses and opens fine.
Direct link: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/10/us/jury-nullification-luigi-mangione-defense/index.html.
Edit 1: updated title, CNN changed it on me
It’s not some minor quirk of the system. It’s the only reason we have juries at all. If you just wanted a group of 12 people to decide guilt and innocence based on the facts of the case and the letter of the law, you would never hire 12 random untrained nobodies for that purpose. If that is all juries were for, you would have professional juries; being a juror would be a career that required a law degree.
We have juries to protect against corrupt laws. That is the only saving grace of having guilt and innocence be decided by 12 random untrained nobodies. Legislatures can become corrupted and end up criminalizing things that the vast majority of the population does not consider to be wrong. A jury of your peers is the last line of defense against corrupt laws. And this mechanism is the only reason we have juries like we do.
No, juries are the triers of fact. Juries do not exist to make a determination as to whether the law is fair or not and are (usually) explicitly told this. They have to listen to the facts, decide what actually happened, and then whether the facts match the elements of whatever crime is being charged.
I agree that getting a jury of twelve randomish peers is actually not the greatest system, but it’s what we’re working with. So in this paradigm, jury nullification is a huge problem because it’s twelve random people just deciding not to enforce a law the rest of society (sort of) has said needs to be enforced. This in turn leads to white supremacists getting acquitted by juries after prosecutors proved beyond a doubt that the defendants committed the crime and the same happening with police that abuse their powers.
It could end up working to protect civil liberties. But the reality is it mostly results in the status quo being upheld and/or actual criminals that need some kind of punishment being acquitted.