On balance, jury nullification in the United States is just

Large parts of my case are almost completely untouched--the Con R3 reads like a response to my rebuttal. I. The purpose of a juryWhiteflame totally drops my analysis of why the peer makeup of juries is important due to radically different social expectations between communities. Extend my analysis and vote Pro--he can't possibly win on inherent justice when he doesn't engage my argument. He doesn't respond in any way to the need for nullification as a safeguard against imperfectly crafted laws punishing non criminals nor the inherent absurdity in "representative" government of such scale. This destroys his argument about nullification being inherently unjust because he's dropped my analysis on why it's a fundamental right and the entire point of a peer jury. His only response is a concession that some contextual variance is good but subjectivity is bad. It's far more arbitrary to judge someone by random values than by those his own and shared by his peers--sharing laws with 300,000,000+ people you have nothing in common with is what's subjective. I don't understand why he's so hung up on subjectivity. If many laws are immoral, and they unquestionably are, it's better to spare some people from a wrongly ruined life than to spare none. I suppose to Whiteflame the Titanic would've been less tragic had everyone died. Because consistency. Recall that were the law applied consistently we would all be in jail. He concedes that "Societal expectations, community norms and intent...all can and should be evaluated." Vote Pro. The only way in this debate to give these issues ANY voice at all is to allow jurors to nullify. He gives a half hearted counterplan in the form of judicial discretion but virtually every crime has some kind of mandatory minimum sentence and in cases where nullification should be used even the minimum penalty is incredibly draconian so there's absolutely nothing that the judge can do. Moreover there are there are TONS of "crimes" that are anything but, like consensual sex or letting children walk home from a park[1]--in these cases ANY penalty is unjust and an outcome that isn't acquittal is an abomination. An unjust law is no law. Juries have an obligation to resist evil. Whiteflame continually argues that the purpose of a jury is to act as "objective" fact finders--despite being the only one in this debate advocating for jurors to ignore facts--but he never actually makes any argument for why this should be their sole imperative other than the extremely weak oath argument and his democracy critique. In contract law oaths made under duress, like the Juror oath, are always void. What we're faced with here is a choice--nullifying vs. imprisoning for life a failed AC repairman or a kid making pot brownies. Whiteflame thinks that because jurors were forced to take an arbitrary oath they should uphold laws that can only be described as evil. Enough jurors know better than that. Voters, you do too.On the democracy argument: One, he hasn't even attempted to address *any* of my arguments throughout the *entire* debate about how the incentive structure disincentives politicians appealing laws. Two, the vast majority of our laws are not made by politicians but by unelected bureaucrats--the statutes passed by congress take up less than a quarter of the space that the regulatory code crafted by agencies does[2]--so if we value democracy there's no issue with nullifying nearly all laws. Three, he never attempts to engage my argument that nullification is necessary because it deals with the here and now. It took California 18 years to amend its three strikes law to exclude non violent crimes through referendum, yet in many places like the Bay area prosecutors had ceased to pursue 3rd strikes for non violent offenders within 2 years as a direct consequence of widespread nullification[3]. Four, he makes no argument for how nullification circumvents other means to change laws. He waxes poetic about how bad it would be if everyone just disengaged, but I'm not advocating for that at all. We can have nullification and still have people vote, argue, ect--his argument just doesn't link to this impact.If nullification is bad as any juror can just override reasonable laws, we should see this impact happening, but we don't because there's no example where the jurors unanimously agree to nullify a just law as it doesn't meet their parameters of acceptable deviance. Remember, a hung jury is NOT an example of nullification and prosecutors can and do just retry the defendants; nullification only occurs when the law is SO unjust that every juror agrees to acquit even in the face of clear guilt. Oddly, he later claims that my arguments are unsound because supposedly nullification rarely occurs. If nullification is not constant in the face of manifestly unfair laws just how rare is it to nullify just laws? So rare that Whiteflame can't cite a single example. If juries nullify more unjust laws than just ones, and they do, nullification is on balance just. Whiteflame argues that reform has been achieved lately and we're on the cusp of even more reform. First, this argument ignores the status quo which is what this debate is about--as long as a single unjust law remains it should be nullified. Secondly his claim that "reform" has occurred on the issues I'm complaining about when he really only cites speeches from politicians skirts dangerously close to intellectual dishonesty. Whiteflame fails to give even a single example of actual reform and at this point he can't since I can't respond. The reality is that there's little hope for real reform--maybe a change here or there, but we're at the point where no one even knows the number of federal laws[4] and law professors are warning us that "There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime"[5]. We need as many tools as we can get to resist overreach. Even if you buy the argument that maybe we are making a tiny bit of progress on the drug war, he has NO solvency for the overregulation of American society which turns us all into unwitting felons. I don't think prosecutors should be allowed to ruin anyone's life with imputiny just because they feel like it. Whiteflame does.His final argument on this point is the strawman that I would rather let crimes go unpunished than get sentences to where they should be. This response highlights an issue present throughout Whiteflames entire rebuttal: he thinks that nullification is mutually exclusive with other forms of activism when it just isn't. I'd love to get sentences to a reasonable level, but until we do there are a lot of cases where nullification is needed. I admit that were we not to imprison someone for life refusing to refund a bad AC repair job we would be denying a tiny, minuscule amount of justice to the aggrieved party but that is massively outweighed by the utter unfairness of the penalty and the broader robbery of societal wealth used to keep so many people behind bars. I think the jilted AC owner would prefer his kid got a full ride to Princeton over the guilt of helping to mete out a despicably excessive penalty in the name of "justice". II. Nullification is necessary Whiteflame makes no attempt to argue against the injustice of any example I've brought up nor against the fact that society is so over regulated that every single one of us is a felon many times over, showing just how absurd the system is. He argues that since jurors didn't nullify in the cases I brought up nullification never works, an odd critique contradicting his previous argument that nullification destroys the means to enforce the law. This is an incredibly unfair burden to throw on me as it's extremely difficult to tell an example of nullification from a genuine acquittal but what we do know is that despite being instructed to blindly follow the law, lied to about the consequences of convicting, and totally uniformed about their right to nullify, jurors in many California districts rendered their three strikes law unenforceable 9 times faster than the system did.He attacks my "logic", arguing that I haven't shown why nullification is ideal. I don't have to prove that nullification perfectly solves the problem of unjust laws to win, I just have to prove that it's better than the alternative. In the debate he gives us no alternative to twiddling our thumbs hoping the system finally works. Nullification ameliorates the problem considerably as the California and other examples show and if even one person is saved from a patently unjust law nullification is superior to the non solution he offers. What solves better, nullification or nothing? Oddly Whiteflame claims that "nullification of rape laws and mass murders continue" despite not citing a single example and links to an article...bemoaning domestic terrorist threats? I don't know what to say here except to point out that the chance of getting a jury that will nullify a rape law is 1.85 x 10^-47. Impacts regarding hung juries are non topical. He completely drops my analysis about how grossly unfair and costly mass incarceration is to both the individuals and the society they belong to. Vote Pro: even if you for some strange reason buy into his arguments for why nullification is inherently unjust by failing to nullify the jury is victimizing us all. This broader societal impact outweighs.I've demonstrated that nullification is a fundamental right complementing the the peer makeup of a jury. I've shown how our society is grossly overregulated and that anyone, at any time, can be judged a criminal costing society wealth untold and I have proven the gross unfairness of our laws as they stand. Nullification is an essential safeguard of last resort against tyranny and has saved many citizens from a hideously unjust fate. One day it may even save you. 1. http://goo.gl...2. http://goo.gl...3. http://goo.gl...4. http://goo.gl...5. http://goo.gl...