R1 Summer Tournament: Jury Nullification

"The helots [slaves] against the elites. Those who have the privilege of being able to speak also have that of saying no, an act whereby they express their critical consciousness."- Jean Baudrillard, FragmentsI. The Law as DoublethinkIn George Orwell's novel 1984, he describes the Ministry of Truth, a government building in which workers knowingly falsify documents all day long, and yet believe what the new records say for them, i.e., they believe that they are falsifying the records, and they believe in what the falsified records say. These two contradictory positions are what he dubs as doublethink, in which someone knowingly has two contradictory opinions, which should be, and are, mutually exclusive, only to believe in both of them at the same time.The current position of law in the world today (and the United States in particular) is no different on any level. Citizens willingly understand that the law is a political arena for which individuals vie for power through not-so-great ways (e.g., corruption, partisanism, etc.), yet they also believe that the law can be upheld through a-political means and through objective means (e.g., that judges always make objective decisions, that police enforce the law equally, etc.). In essence, individuals believe that the law is inherently political in means and existence, yet individuals also believe that the law is enforced through just, a-political, and equal means.Through this doublethink of the understanding of the law, citizens are often complicit and silent in the oppression they face; if they believe that the law is just and impartial, then they often will not speak out against government decidedly ruling against justice. John Hasnas in The Myth of the Rule of Law provides an excellent articulation of this idea, "[f]or if citizens really believe that they are being governed by fair and impartial rules and that the only alternative is subjection to personal rule, they will be much more likely to support the state as it progressively curtails their freedom."The law is inherently unable to be objectively enforced, for the law, as opposed to the real world, makes decisions that are based around 'logically sound' conclusions. The measure for what a 'logically sound' conclusion is, only deals with the conclusion itself and not what premises it comes from. If the premises are contradictory, almost any logically sound conclusion can and will be met, and thus the objectivity of the law comes into question, especially when the premises from which the conclusion arises are open to extreme interpretation. Even a strict wording of the law does not lead to uninterpretable laws, because "we could not produce such a legal code because there is simply no such thing as uninterpretable language," (John Hasnas) and thus, the objectivity of the law does not exist at the level in which we are told.And let's assume for a moment that we could make a set of un-interpretable and completely objective laws, why would we do so? The more rigid in which the law becomes, the less likely that it is able to exactly provide justice to an individual (for example, a strict reading of murder laws could make those that use self-defense murderers, and there are countless other objections one could raise), and the purpose of the law is to provide an orderly and just experience within life, even if these two ideals are in tension. If the law were fully rigid, then it would have no ability to consider the "equities of the particular case" (John Hasnas). Thus, an embracement of the fluidity of the law is the only way to preserve justice.II. Jury NullificationJury nullification exists as a way of subversion to the law and to expose its fluidity. A rejection of jury nullification is a way of reducing the ability of the oppressed to flex the system and to have it change to meet a standard of what is just, for example, even after the 14th amendment was passed, many courts still found ways to promote segregation -- an individualistic use of the flexibility of the law, even if the law does not exist on an objective level, still finds a way to promote justice abroad. To nullify the law when it is against justice for an individual is to embrace that the law is flexible, and to embrace that the law's purpose was to exist as a way of enforcing justice.John Hasnas again writes, "the juror’s act of nullification ... exposes the indeterminacy of law, but does not create it."And jury nullification works as a way to breaking down the ways in which doublethink runs our lives -- if we no longer think that the world is objective in nature and application, then we can find ways to try to change the ways in which justice is served to people. Instead of a blind following of the path of what the government tells us, we are able to provide what we believe justice to be.Jury nullification serves as a way of stopping the cogs from turning from a while by jamming one cog -- after a while, the entire system stops working as it did before. Just having one dissenting opinion in a jury results in a hung jury, and that is incredibly empowering for those that wish to stop the oppressive forces for which they come from. If injustice is seen and injustice is brought forward, the only ethical demand is to promote justice, and justice can only exist within the flexibility of jurors themselves -- justice is only preserved when an individual embraces the fact that the law describes justice, not prescribes it.Baudrillard was correct in writing that dissenting against injustice leads to critical consciousness, and that leads to the ability to remove our doublethink.