The United States ought to make jury nullification illegal.

I"ll go the same order he did. Sparf I really only have one response here, since he"s agreed that overturning Sparf is necessary to overturning jury nullification. He says, and I quote: But as I"ve shown, nullification is also a vital part of society and the law system. He hasn"t shown this at all. He"s shown how it theoretically might be helpful, but he hasn"t shown how it"s been an invaluable part of our system. Because of the Sparf decision, most people don"t know about nullification (since judges and lawyers don"t like it and aren"t legally required to tell people about it), and thus aren"t exercising it. Not sure what"s "essential" about it. He himself recognizes that it only happens between three and four percent of court cases (wondering where he"s getting this info? ) Court of Appeals Analysis 1. In response to his argument against the quote "a person can leave his freedom at the hands of people who are not being held accountable for their verdict and that their verdict is final and no other consequences can follow," he says that there are all sorts of ways a jury"s decision can be found out and overturned. One problem: that response makes jury nullification pointless. Judges and lawyers notoriously despise nullification; there"s a reason jurors are rarely told about it. If the point of jury nullification is to prevent people from getting convicted by unjust laws, then he can"t just say, "well, there are ways of finding out a jury"s decision and overturning it," then nullification becomes irrelevant because a judge will always overturn it. This doesn"t really make sense. 2. He"s non-responsive to probably the most damning constitutional flaw in supporting nullification: equal protection. If two people can receive different treatment under the same law, then equal protection is null and void. Extend my fourteenth amendment analysis, which impacts back to his constitutionality standard. 3. But even if you don"t buy the fourteenth amendment argument, it"s still the case that nullification is pragmatically ineffective, since juries can"t corroborate their decisions (i. e. Jury 1 can"t say to Jury 2, "Nullify this law, because we did") insofar as that will bias the jury, and the lawyers will weed them out. He also doesn"t respond to this. When he says, "a substantial instrument for the evaluation of the rule of law and the system," he couldn"t be further from the truth: juries aren"t elected to change or evaluate the laws in the system, and they can"t do it in any unified, objective manner. Checks in the System and Constitutionality 1. As to his insistence on citing the founding fathers as a way of supporting nullification. Andrew Leipold 2 writes, "Yet, if the framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights thought that nullification was an important part of the right to trial by jury, they were awfully quiet about it. There is very little in the debates surrounding the drafting or ratification to suggest that they even thought about the issue, much less intended to incorporate it in the Constitution. While the Supreme Court, in construing the constitutional right to a jury, has been curiously closed-mouthed about the topic, the one time the Court spoke clearly, it decisively stated that a jury's power to nullify does not mean that a defendant has the right to be tried before a jury with that power. In the 1895 decision of Sparf and Hansen v. United States, the Court laid the groundwork for the rule that still prevails in most of the country -- judges are not required to tell juries that they have the power to acquit against the evidence nor are they required to let lawyers argue to the jury in favor of nullification. The message is clear -- even if courts can't stop juries from nullifying, they are under no legal obligation to help juries exercise the power. " Jury nullification doesn"t appear in the constitution at all. If it was as big a deal as he"s making it out to be, its inclusion would have made sense during the founding of the republic. 2. He directly contradicts himself when he says, "the jury isn"t obligated to reveal their reason on their verdict," since he said earlier that there are all these ways of making sure a jury isn"t toeing the line legally. 3. He says I"m misinterpreting the Magna Carta. The more important document to examine is the Constitution, which upholds equal protection under the law, meaning the law that exists. Since I"ve already proven that jury nullification thwarts equal protection, you"re still going to prefer a world where the jury is deciding on the facts of the case, not the justness of the law itself. He never responds to the fact that in the US we elect the legislature for that purpose; we don"t have juries for that purpose. 4. His statement "If we illegalize nullification, we are forcing the jury to reveal how they reached a verdict" makes no sense. A jury can find a defendant guilty or innocent based on the facts of the case (since the facts of the case aren"t always black and white or easy to adjudicate on) and not reveal every step they made in making the decision. I don"t really understand what he"s trying to say here. 5. His double jeopardy point doesn"t make sense either. It"s unconstitutional to try someone for a crime that was legal when it was committed, so this wouldn"t happen in a nullification-free world either. One last point, this time on the "facts of the case" vs. "judging the law itself. " 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. Due process under the law and equal protection under the law means that laws have to exist objectively in order for those frameworks to make sense; jury nullification undermines this. He never adequately responds to my due process analysis either; due process under the law means that 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. Leipold 1 Analysis 1. Juries can"t talk for many reasons. The facts of the case may have involved sensitive materials, identities may have been confidential, etc. 2. Evidence isn"t always black or white; I"d say it rarely is, in fact. So his simplistic analysis of "jury nullification reflects the real world" and "jury nullification in the PRO world is just like being a judge" is nonsensical. 3. I"d like to know how he gets in the mind of a jury, especially since jurors can"t reveal their adjuications in most cases. 4. Nullification, even if you buy his analysis that it"s objective within an individual court case, isn"t objective on the broad scale of the application of law (here you can extend my fourteenth amendment analysis again) since with the power of nullification, Defendant Y can be convicted on a law but Defendant X could be acquitted since the jury happened to be sympathetic with him. This isn"t an objective procedure. Thus, you"re voting PRO because I"ve continually shown how this process isn"t objective whatsoever and I prove two fatal constitutional violations: due process and equal protection become undermined in the CON world. You"re going to prefer the PRO side in this debate since I show concrete examples of how nullification undermines the constitution, whereas he has to make inferences that don"t hold up, since nullification never once appears in the constitution.