Jury Nullification
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
To read how it is applied today in the us, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Un...
On a serious note, yes it is. However, it is very interesting as a European learning about a mechanism that allows the jury to say we believe someone has done that, but we don't believe it should be guilty
IIRC the judge explicitly told the jury that the offered defence wasn't valid as a matter of law, but they acquitted him anyway.
The right wing of the country was obviously in uproar and demanding changes to the system or that some exception be made. Except, interestingly, for the poshest and possibly most right wing MP of all, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Iirc he said that even though he disagreed with the verdict, jury nullification is there for a good reason and the jury was perfectly within protocol to do what they did. He's a nasty piece of work but every now and then comes across as surprisingly principled.
We have jury trials for a reason. Sometimes the law as written needs to be interpreted by the people it serves.
Disingenuous and awful; there’s no wonder it exists when the judiciary thinks it can will it out of existence.
I’m not some sovcit nutjob either, but someone who took standard US public school and university civics classes and paid close attention because it fascinated me.
Remember that jury nullification, if you support it, is a very narrow exception to the general principle that juries are deciding facts rather than law. It would be an obvious miscarriage of justice if a juror tried to "nullify" the reasonable doubt standard because they think the defendant is guilty, or "nullify" some valid defense to the crime because they don't think the legislature should have included it.
If the law itself is unjust then the only just course a jury can take is to find the defendant not guilty.
On one extreme the jury carefully reviews the law as written and makes a judgement focused on the law. Whether they agree or disagree with the law itself is inconsequential, they must apply it.
On the other extreme (jury nullification) the jury might ignore the law and decide for themselves, then and there, what is right and what is wrong.
In many jurisdictions the jury is encouraged to adhere to the law as written, in some it is "illegal" for the jury to willfully ignore the law but there is no punishment for doing so. The concept of "Jury Nullification" is meant to be a checks & balances if some law exists that is insane or unreasonable or would be morally bankrupt to apply in a particular situation, extreme cases. So the pressure to not apply jury nullification in general is because if it were used in every case, not extreme cases, literally the jury then becomes the congress, the makers of law, and of course everything becomes kind of random and unfair depending on whatever jury you got.
It's also a really bad idea to bank on getting. As voir dire (jury selection) is basically the prosecution devoting all their resources to make sure that they don't get a jury stacked with enough jurors willing to nullify. A judge might also declare a mistrial if they get a sense a nullification attempt is in the works or likely. A prosecutor may decline to prosecute, or petition for a change of venue if they get a sense the populace would just nullify anyway. Judges will tend to be very cross and threatening at the prospect, and will lecture at length about how bad it would be if you chose that path, etc.... etc.... It is very much the judicial equivalent of a vote of no confidence in the system, and the system hates being confronted with it.
Long story short, it's a populace's nuclear option with all the baggage that entails. It being employed is a signal that so much is wrong, the populace cannot conscionably allow the system to proceed as normal. It's a wake-up call to all three branches. Legislators that the law they passed may be unconscionable, the executive in that the People cannot endorse their execution of the laws as passed, and the judiciary, in that in no way shape or form can this randomly selected jury abide the status quo.
But jury discussions and motivations are sacrosanct, and you can't be punished for the "wrong" verdict. So technically you can ignore the law and vote how you like, allowing juries to effectively "nullify" a law by refusing to convict on it.
But allowing a jury to ignore the law as written means they can convict or not based solely on political leaning, ethnicity, sexuality or religion etc.
It's often cited as a way for society to oppose laws they disagree with, but is very much frowned upon by the legal system as it is easily exploited for very nefarious purposes and leads to a very unbalanced system rather than a consistent rule of law.