The United States ought to make jury nullification illegal.

I affirm the resolution "The United States ought to make jury nullification illegal." The inherent plan text of the resolution, then, is to overturn the Supreme Court decision made in Sparf v. US, wherein it was declared jurors have the right to nullify in court cases, but judges and lawyers do not have to tell them they have this right. This has made nullification effectively illegal, since so few know about it; it is the affirmative advocacy that the Supreme Court ought to come right out and declare this action unconstitutional, and thereby illegal. The standard I wish to uphold throughout this debate is increasing objectivity in law, i.e. amping up the number of checks within the system. Objectivity is inseparable from law enforcement because law enforcement in a country like the United States must be universal. In the US"s founding documents, namely the Constitution, juries are described as "impartial" agents of law who bestow objective sentences to criminals. Jan R. Sieckmann explains, "The objectivity of law is a classical topic of legal philosophy, closely related to issues of the legitimacy of law and of adjudication. Objectivity of law in first line means that it is a normative order which is the same for everyone, independently of anyone's subjective attitudes. Accordingly, legal statements may be true or false, and are not merely expressions of subjective views. Law may also be called objective in the sense that it is neutral against different persons, groups or interests. The objective character of law is essential to the function of law to constitute a normative order for a society as a whole, that is a set of common norms binding on all its addressees. With no objective existence law could not fulfill this function, and without neutrality it would fulfill it badly. In this respect, there seems to be no doubt that law is objective in its nature and should be objective in its content and procedures. This holds true notwithstanding the fact that the requirement of objectivity in practice will not always be fulfilled." The thesis and sole contention of my position is that jury nullification is not an objective procedure, and as such it cannot be used as a just check on government. Although not all jurors are unintelligent or uniformed, all jurors come from different backgrounds and carry different beliefs about many laws. All jurors will have biases that will either play a slight or significant role in the decision they render in a criminal case. With the power of jury nullification, however, jurors now have the ability to put their opinion in practice. While a juror"s opinion might not be bad or possibly have a slight degree of truth to it, when a jury acts upon an opinion of twelve people and makes it into societal law they are not acting objectively. The United States Court of Appeals writes, "More generally, the very institution of trial by jury in a criminal case, as Judge Learned Hand observed, "[Jury nullification] introduces a slack into the enforcement of law, tempering its rigor by the mollifying influence of current ethical conventions." U.S. ex rel. McCann v. Adams , 126 F.2d 774, 776 (2d Cir.), rev'd on other grounds , 317 U.S. 269 (1942). This is so because, as Judge Hand explained, "[t]he individual can forfeit his liberty--to say nothing of his life--only at the hands of those who, unlike any official, are in no wise accountable, directly or indirectly, for what they do, and who at once separate and melt anonymously in the community from which they came. . . . [S]ince if they acquit their verdict is final, no one is likely to suffer of whose conduct they do not morally disapprove . . . ." Id. at 775-76." Jury nullification is a fleeting doctrine of law; rulings come and go, and change at the whim of the group of twelve randomly selected people. Furthermore, what the Court of Appeals establishes here is that if jury nullification were used as a check on government, the jury itself would not be able to be checked, insofar as being a juror is only a temporary position. Thus, because the very institution of a jury is fleeting, if a jury were to change a law entirely and subjectively, they would not be accounted for. The Constitution would also be violated in this regard; the Constitution guarantees due process under an objective set of laws, but, if nullification were in place, some criminals would be getting due process under existing norms, while others would not be getting due process; they would be getting an entirely new ruling. Eric J. Haynie writes, "A second and related reason courts refuse nullification instructions is that they would frustrate[s] due process.(94) As the venerable Latin maxim nullum crimen sine lege, nulla poena sine lege provides, there shall be "no crime without law, nor punishment without law."(95) This maxim rings true today in the constitutional due process requirement that criminal liability and punishment be based only "upon a prior legislative enactment of a prohibition expressed with adequate precision and clarity."(96) As the Supreme Court has stated, "[l]iving under a rule of law entails various suppositions, one of which is that [all persons] are entitled to be informed as to what the State commands or forbids."(97) By affirmatively authorizing juries to assign moral blame inconsistent with the law, nullification instructions confuse juries and increase the odds that a defendant will be convicted of conduct he is not on notice to avoid.(98) "Nullification instructions also frustrate due process by thwarting a defendant's "fundamental right" to a fair, impartial trial by jury.(99) The Sixth Amendment(100) guarantees every criminal defendant a trial based exclusively on the evidence of record,(101) in accordance with the laws,(102) and free from outside influences.(103) By making the jury the "finder of law" as well as fact, however, nullification instructions encroach upon the promise of due process. For what better way to ensure a verdict outside the law than to instruct jurors that they may ignore it." Moreover, the way the jury comes to a verdict would be further exacerbated. If the jury were to nullify a law, how they arrived at that conclusion cannot be objectively determined because juries do not disclose their decisions. Andrew Leipold writes, "Because juries almost never explain their verdicts, it is impossible to say how often nullification occurs. Our inability to determine when and why it does also means that we do not know how often juries use this power for good ends rather than evil ones. For every case where a jury acts morally and shows mercy, there may be another where a jury acquits because of hatred toward the victim or favoritism to the defendant. It takes strong faith in human nature to support a doctrine like jury nullification, knowing that the decision to set someone free can be made on a whim or based on prejudice." For all these reasons, I support the resolution.