Resolved: In the United States, the principle of jury nullification is a just check on government.

I. INTRODUCTION: In this debate today the Negative will prove that Jury Nullification is an unjust check on the government and will prove how it is unjust. II. RESOLUTION: Resolved: In the United States, the principle of jury nullification is a just check on government. III. DEFINITIONS: I am using Merriam-Webster.com to define most of my terms. I would like to stipulate the terms that may come up in this debate as synonyms for Nullification: acquit, exculpate, discharge, vindication. •Principle: a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption ; a rule or code of conduct •Jury Nullification: Jury nullification is the power and ability of a criminal trial jury, federal or state, to acquit the defendant not only on the "facts" of the case but to declare the law illegal, nonsensical, or otherwise simply not justifiably enforceable. I.e., the jury can "nullify" the law. In Laymen's terms Jury Nullification means: an instance when a jury returns a verdict of "Not Guilty" despite its belief that the defendant is guilty of the violation charged. The jury in effect nullifies a law that it believes is either immoral or wrongly applied to the defendant whose fate that is charged with deciding. •Just: guided by truth, reason, justice, and fairness; given or awarded rightly; deserved, as a sentence, punishment, or reward •Check: to prove to be right; correspond accurately; to investigate or verify as to correctness. • Government: the form or system of rule by which a state, community, etc., is governed. IIII. VALUE: Injustice IV. CRITERA: The government already has a system of checks and balances made, the 12 picked- at- random- jurors don't have the right to try to bend the laws as they see fit for a trial. VII. CONTENTIONS Contention 1: Jury Nullification is unjust for minorities. Jury nullification is unjust to minority groups because it gives more judicial power to the majority, while the Judicial Branch is the branch of government most suited to protect minority groups. The American checks and balance system works to prevent any member or group within the government from seizing too much power, but it also works to prevent any group of people or sector of the public from having too much effectual power in government. While the legislature and the executive branches are both popularly elected, the judicial branch is filled mostly by appointments. The appointed judges are meant to serve as unbiased interpreters of the law. They serve to ensure that society follows the laws it has set out for itself, and also that no person is punished for an unjust law that violates the constitution. The Supreme Court has often been ahead of its time in protecting the rights of the few: Brown v. Board of Ed. preceded the Civil Rights Act; the Warren Court's criminal rights decisions were unpopular with the public at the time, but are generally accepted today; Roe v. Wade protected the right to choose when almost every State had abolished that right. But it is the role of judges at every level of the judicial system to act as the unbiased referees of the law, in protection of both the many and the few. This prerogative is restricted by jury nullification because biased jurors can overrule an unbiased judge who is attempting to provide a minority group equal protection under the law. CONTENTION 2: Jury Nullification can be an unjust when a jury is racially discriminatory towards a group etc. In the American South, during the Civil Rights Movement, while slavery was still prevalent and people were still extremely racist towards African Americans, juries constantly threw away any charges against white citizens who had harmed (or even killed) black citizens, no matter what the law, evidence, or jury instructions were. A.For an example in literature that many people can relate to when a jury nullified something, would be in the fictional book "To Kill a Mockingbird" which was based upon actual trials that happened in the American South. The basis of the trial in the book was: A black man was on trial for murder, there was an all white jury, all the evidence pointed to a white woman committing the crime, the jury was very racist and ignored the facts and all the proof that the black man did no such crime. The jury decided that the man was guilty and convicted him of murder. The jury has nullified the law and right to the man convicted, that he was innocent until proven guilty. He was plainly innocent, but since the jury was biased, the nullified that law and concluded that he was guilty. B.The point of this is that, a jury should have to abide by laws and should have to take in effect these laws, in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. when they are judging a verdict. The laws of the government have been checked time and time again, and they don't need to bend the laws to fit how they see the convicted person, they need to acknowledge the laws, and base their verdict on facts brought up in that trial. CONTENTION 3: Courts recently have been reluctant to encourage jury nullification, and in fact have taken several steps to prevent it. In most jurisdictions, judges instruct jurors that it is their duty to apply the law as it is given to them, whether they agree with the law or not. Only in a handful of states are jurors told that they have the power to judge both the facts and the law of the case. Most judges also will prohibit attorneys from using their closing arguments to directly appeal to jurors to nullify the law. A.This just proves that even in court cases, the judges find it unjust to use jury nullification in a trial. Recently, several courts have indicated that judges also have the right, when it is brought to their attention by other jurors, to remove (prior to a verdict, of course) from juries any juror who makes clear his or her intention to vote to nullify the law. B.Judges have worried that informing jurors of their power to nullify will lead to jury anarchy, with jurors following their own sympathies. They suggest that informing of the power to nullify will increase the number of hung juries. Some judges also have pointed out that jury nullification has had both positive and negative applications--the negative applications including some notorious cases in which all-white southern juries in the 1950s and 1960s refused to convict white supremacists for killing blacks or civil rights workers despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. Finally, some judges have argued that informing jurors of their power to nullify places too much weight on their shoulders--that is easier on jurors to simply decide facts, not the complex issues that may be presented in decisions about the morality or appropriateness of laws. VIII.CONCLUSION: In this debate, I've proven how Jury Nullification is indeed unjust, and an unneeded check upon the government. The government has laws and rules that it already is governed by and the people of a 12 member jury don't need to check up on it, because the laws are already checked through the system of check and balances in the United States.