The United States ought to make jury nullification illegal.

I understand missing a round; it happened to me not long ago myself. That said, I'll just extend all of my arguments from the previous round; as a result, they don't bear repeating. Rather, I'll just go over the two key areas, namely my stated standard of objectivity and his implicit standard of constitutionality. I think both bear themselves out to the PRO side of this debate. Objectivity 1. The first two areas where the PRO upholds objectivity better comes in the analysis I provided in my defense of my US Court of Appeals Analysis (point #2 in round 2 under the Court of Appeals analysis). Law is meant to apply equally to all people, which means that since, for instance, murder is a crime, then someone guilty of murder ought to be convicted by every potential jury that would see him/her. (I'm aware that there are different types of punishment for murder on a state-by-state basis, but that doesn't change the fact of conviction by all potential juries. ) Jury nullification is a pragmatically non-objective way of enforcing the law, insofar as the law is not guaranteed to apply equally to all people. (I'm aware a jury is unlikely to make exceptions for murder via nullification, but the logic holds the same to other laws, say particular drug statutes. ) This directly discredits all of my opponent's claims to the effect of, "Well, we can use jury nullification to check unjust laws," or, more explicitly, ". .. as I've shown, nullification is also a vital part of society and the law system. " If a big chunk of a country is full of juries that will enforce an unjust law, but there happen to be a few precincts where people will use nullification, that result isn't communicated to other juries. Law, by this metric, is not applied objectively. This is the first place you're voting PRO, insofar as I've shown that his mechanism for fixing/checking bad laws will always be un-objective, which is the nature of law as established by my Sieckmann analysis at the top of my case in Round 1. 2. Plus, even if you don't buy the above argument, consider that nullification does nothing to actually change unjust laws; fixing it in one case doesn't create the necessary to move political will in the legislature (which, keep in mind, is the very institution enshrined by the Constitution to create and modify the law; I'll get to this in the Constiutionality debate). 3. Stemming from the above two points is the utter lack of pragmatic proof on his side of the debate. There's a noticeable lack of historical examples for an institution that he somehow manages to suggest is (A) "a vital part of society and the law system" and (B) used in only 3 to 4 percent of cases [an un-backed statistic, I'd say, which doesn't really make sense to me. Because of the Sparf decision, juries are rarely told about nullification and therefore don't use it. Consider the struggling efforts of the Fully Informed Jurors Association here. Even if you don't buy my argument that nullification is inherently un-objective, you at least have to notice the lack of pragmatics to hold the contrary position true. 4. Another key tension in his case, following from the objectivity arguments I've been making against his case throughout this debate, come in the form of his responses to my claims that juries don't have to reveal their decisions in the cases of nullification. He keeps saying things like, "No, there are ways for judges to correct the wrong decisions of juries. " The problem with this response is that it works to undercut his side of the debate. If judges can overturn a decision they find objectionable, then they're going to overturn any sort of nullification, since judges and lawyers notoriously despise nullification. (There's a reason why the Sparf decision is what it is, and why most laypeople don't know what nullification is: judges don't want them to know). Thus, if you buy his refutation to my argument about nullification being un-checkable, you're buying into a system that prefers the PRO vision of law anyways (because the decision of the case will have to be by the facts of the case, not by nullification). It's a double-bind, and therefore a PRO vote either way. Thus, I'm still upholding my initial standard of objectivity, and you're preferring PRO on this issue. Constitutionality 1. Obviously in light of missing the last round, my opponent didn't get to respond to my Andrew Leipold 2 analysis, so I'll just extend it instead of repeating it here. The simple point is this: if nullification were this bastion of constitutional justice as he's making it out to be, it'd be in the constitution. The Leipold 2 analysis tells you that talks of nullification were surprisingly silent during the drafting of the constitution, and the now-standing Supreme Court decision (Sparf) isn't very pro-nullification. I think at face this demonstrates that the constitutional support for nullification is thin. 2. He points out that there is no place in the constitution that specifically bans nullification. This is correct. But there are two explicit provisions of the constitution that are undermined by nullification, and thus you're going to prefer the PRO as far as constitutionality is concerned. The first violation is Equal Protection. This goes woefully underrefuted on his side of the debate. Since the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law (which has to mean the existing law, otherwise you could just insert whatever law you wanted in to that statement, which doesn't make sense), you can't have a system that treats all citizens differently based on the whims of a jury. I think this pretty clearly bears itself out. The second violation is Due Process. If a defendant is guaranteed due process under the law (again, this has to be the existing law), then the jury's nullification of the law violates the due process the defendant was guaranteed before the trial began, under the existing law. As I mentioned in the last round, "the defendant is tried based on the laws that exist when s/he is indicted for that crime, which means the jury can't make the law which the defendant is being tried for obsolete. This doesn't make sense constitutionally. " 3. I think an implicit constitutional violation comes in the form of how our democracy works. We hire juries to try defendants based on the law of the land (i. e. the existing law, since we have to know what the law is in order to try a defendant for/against it). They aren't elected; they're selected by a particular process not decided upon by the populous. We do, however, elect the legislature to change/modify laws if we do not like them. I recognize this isn't always a speedy process, but it's historically a better mechanism than the one described by CON, especially since he has provided no examples as to how nullification has checked the system. 4. Finally, as to the "facts of the case" vs. justness of the law distinction. Yes, it is true that it is not said in the constitution that "jury trials are only decided on the facts of the case. " But practically, these are how jury decisions play out. As I mentioned in the last round, "The reason we have laypeople be jurors is that they can rule on the facts presented by the case; that is, they can determine whether or not evidence is valid or not. Jurors are not trained, however, for the complexities of law, and whether or not a certain law works in a particular instance. Jurors are smart, but they aren"t hired or elected to change the application of a law in a particular instance. " Thus, you're preferring a world where jury decisions are made on the facts of the case, not the un-objective, unconstitutional world where nullification only attempts to fix the wrongs of the law. Thus, because I'm upholding both my standard of objectivity and his standard of constitutionality, I believe your ballot should be PRO.