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[-] Daft_ish@lemmy.world 85 points 1 year ago

Juries can nullify any charge based on their own discretion.

[-] trafficnab@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 year ago

Knowing this is how you get out of jury duty

[-] Maggoty@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Or, how you make sure a bullshit case doesn't convict someone...

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 23 points 1 year ago

Lol this one is actually illegal to tell others. In the UK you can be tried for contempt of court if you're caught telling people about nullification, and the juror's oath tries to explicitly discourage it.

That being said, what's to stop a jury in a case of nullification from... nullifying your case?

[-] Miaou@jlai.lu 7 points 1 year ago

I might be confused, isn't this the whole point of a jury in the first place?

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

The point of a jury is to get people who are unbiassed to determine guilt or innocence to help make the trial fair and not a kangaroo court. The jury determining that they absolutely did it, but the law is bullshit so they shouldn't be punished and submitting a not guilty verdict anyway is basically a glitch or an exploit. They're not there to determine the validity of the law, just whether or not the law was broken.

The real joke is that the founding fathers genuinely expected people to be fair, impartial and unbiased.

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I mean, nobody in any country has found a better option yet and it's been a couple centuries.

[-] pinkdrunkenelephants@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

🤔 I made a thread a while back asking people here what they would do if they were founding a country, and one guy had the best solution I ever heard anyone come up with:

It was this tiered, hierarchial council lottery system where people were randomly elected to serve on councils that managed every aspect of day to day life. Eligibility for each council depended on your education, age, background, etc. and it was set up such that you had to take leave from your old job, but your spot would be held, you'd be paid the same rate you were before, etc. to disincentivize people from not participating.

He went into a lot of detail about it, and had a long writeup for it because it was a project for his pol sci degree, and it was based on the assumption that no human involved was scrupulous or trustworthy, and if some aspect of the system could be abused, it would be.

To this day I have not seen anyone come up with a better governance idea, past or present.

[-] VindictiveJudge@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I specifically meant the jury thing.

[-] merthyr1831@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Following is a generally devil's advocate point here, because in principle I'm wholly supportive of jury nullification:

The idea of the jury being able to cast verdicts on conscience rather than just evidence does also, however, risk personal bias influencing trials regressively. It is not unknown for systems to acquit or convict someone based on racial prejudice or media coverage of a case, which is why even a sniff of conscience voting of any kind is heavily policed.


There's a whole host of selection processes that try and limit bias in trials while keeping the state from totally controlling the process, but jury duty is one of the only examples of direct democracy under most neoliberal capitalist systems; that comes with all the risks and caveats that it would when applied to any other aspect of our social and political existences

this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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