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Comment by arcastroe | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. If you google "jury nullification", google provides a helpful "answer" at the very top

> There is no such thing as valid jury nullification[.] You would violate your oath and the law if you willfully brought a verdict contrary to the law given to you in this case.

However, the link this is sourced from paints a very different picture. Right after those two sentences, the source says:

> the Kleinman court found [these] two sentences to be error because they suggested that nullification could be punished and that an acquittal resulting from nullification would be invalid.

Seems google didn't do a good job at providing a helpful summary of jury nullification.

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Lawyers I know are very anti jury nullification and they claim it's for well rationed reasons (that I don't recall) and not just group think in that it makes the lives of lawyers more difficult. I tend to want to believe them, but at the same time find our justice and punishment system horrific and sort of don't care if JN isn't ~theoretically~ the best thing to do in our legal system

JN is an escape hatch, similar to those built into programming tools. You really cannot and should not take away the ability of people to step back from a situation and realize the the law, when applied, leads to a perverse outcome that is truly abhorrent. The jury is how you factor in a "gut check" into your system.

To be sure, this can fail. You get a bunch of jurors who are ignorant or evil in a coherent way, who decide to ignore the law and effectively lynch a man because he's black or back up the school administrator who wants to teach creationism or Jewish space lasers or whatever. Personally, I think that's an acceptable risk, in part because if you take the application of the law away from sentimental flawed rational animals you have to give it to someone else - someone (or something) with power and sitting in the seat of authority. In a sense one way to characterize democracy is as a constant struggle between jury (electorate) and judge (political leader). The way the jury system is supposed to work, the fact it was written into the Constitution, is indeed very important and I'm glad for this sub-thread is talking about it.

I agree. The discussion has merit.

I hate to say it, but there are times when something is illegal, but the scenario challenges that in a super compelling way. JN both brings that to light and gives a jury that opportunity to support an actor who has a valid basis for their actions.

I feel similar dynamics surround mandatory sentencing.

Yeh I mean as a general rule, probably don't read algorithmically-generated summaries of any content, ever. It's never going to be a good idea to rely on software to try to contextualize human-written text. Unless you like arbitrary falsehoods and misinformation sprinkled into half of your beliefs/thoughts, I guess.

The error is not that someone read what google presented. The error is that google presented something wrong.

Both?

Yeah agree with sibling comment: both. Never trust a machine, an algorithm, a piece of software. Maybe unless it has been built to extremely stringent specifications that are publicly available and verifiable -- which is blatantly not the case for proprietary closed-source search engines.

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