Drugs Criminalizing drug offenders is often racist and unethical – status quo rehab decisions are disproportionate Collins-Chobanian 09 Shari, phd in philosophy, prof @ ASU, “Analysis of Paul Butler's Race-Based Jury Nullification and His Call to Black Jurors and the African American Community” Journal of Back Studies 39.4, 2009, [, , ] Addicts are often attempting to medicate their psychological pain, and in fact, there is a significant correlation, a comorbidity, between psychological disturbances such as attention deficit disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD) disorder, bipolarity, depression, anxiety, and (illegal) drug use. For example, studies have found that 52% of adults with ADHD abused drugs at some point in their lives, compared to 27% of control groups (see Biederman et al., 1995). Oftentimes, once addicts get clean, then the underlying psycho-logical disturbances can be successfully treated. In prison, addicts have access to drugs, and prisons are not equipped to act as drug rehabilitation centers. Imprisoning (nonviolent) addicts is doubly wrong; it is wrong because it is punishing a nonviolent person who is sick rather than giving her or him the necessary medical and psychological treatment, and it is wrong berance soci-etal White privilege and racial discrimination carry over into the justice system with a vengeance, resulting in obscene disparate impact. The face of those in rehabilitation is disproportionately White, and the face of those imprisoned for nonviolent drug abuse is disproportionately As such, I find the drug war inconsistent with other public policy and laws, discriminatory in intent as well as effect, and I am not troubled by the terminology Butler uses when refer-ring to nonviolent drug use as "victimless." I turn now to Leipold's critique. White.
Kenneth, attorney, “The Contradictory Stance on Jury Nullification” 88 North Dakota Law Review, 409 2012 [, , ] As a final example of the general rule, courts are forthright about the illegality of nullification when it comes to whether jurors with a penchant for nullifying can be struck during voir dire: the answer is a clear yes. "[C]ourts have excluded potential nullifiers from the jury before or even during trial."38 This general rule, though, is subject to one limited, but important, exception, discussed further in Section B. There’s no settled conclusion on jury nullification in status quo law Duvall 12 Kenneth, attorney, “The Contradictory Stance on Jury Nullification” 88 North Dakota Law Review, 409 2012 [, , ] As the result of a back and forth battle over jury nullification lasting centuries, different courts and jurisdictions remain maligned over the issue. Although courts currently disagree over their power and control over jury nullification as well as the role it plays in the criminal justice system, the United States Supreme Court has attempted to resolve these issues. In order to understand the current role of jury nullification, we must parse the language of the Supreme Court, which has in fact stated nullification is an illegal act by the jury, and yet curiously capitulates to the jury's capacity to nullify at will.
AT Backlash Backlash is speculative – if it’s true, it could lead to affirmative action placement on juries, which would be good Collins-Chobanian 09 Shari, phd in philosophy, prof @ ASU, “Analysis of Paul Butler's Race-Based Jury Nullification and His Call to Black Jurors and the African American Community” Journal of Back Studies 39.4, 2009, [, , ] Marder's final criticism of Butler leads me to my final point. Marder (1999b) claims that if Butler were successful, his "plan contains the seeds of its own undoing" (p. 931). This is because judges and prosecutors would assume that Blacks would nullify, and therefore, they would find some reason not to seat them on juries, thus placing Black jury service, a hard-won oppor-tunity, at risk. The check on this should not be to disregard Butler's proposal based on speculative consequences but instead to consider affirmative action for juries. Affirmative action for juries has been suggested for a number of rea-sons, including both historical and disclriminatory residential segregation, whereby it is often difficult to obtain a heterogeneous jury. "Because we do have such a history, choosing a jury 'neutrally' often means imposing on the jury a racial disproportion, the effects of which can be unfair to the defendant—or in some cases, to the prosecution" (Colb, 2002; see also Berger, 1998; Butler, 1997a; Marder, 2002b).
AT Jurors Racist Juries get a bad rap; they’re far less racist than having others in the CJS making decisions. Their evidence is scapegoating, discount it, Conrad 14 Conrad, Clay S, author and attorney, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, published by Cato Institute, 2014 edition, originally published 1998, ProQuest. [, , ] As an institution, the jury has received a great deal of criticism, much of it unwarranted. This criticism tends to come from an elitist perspective: jurors are variously described as being “dumb,” “racist,” “irrational,” “uneducated,” “lazy,” “irresponsible,” “ignorant,” or “emotional.” Of course, these same critics are confident that they would never be selected for jury duty: they are too “intelligent,” “objective,” “informed,” or “educated.” In fact, none of these criticisms are borne out by statistics: jurors, on average, have a few more months of education than the average American. Jurors tend to take their jobs with a profound sense of responsibility, apply themselves with a great deal of energy and sincerity, and show less racial disparity in their decisions than any of the other actors in the criminal justice system— police, prosecutors, or judges. Yet it has become arrogantly fashionable to scapegoat the jury for any outcome in the legal system with which we are dissatisfied. Acquittal and voir dire solves Brooks 04 Thom, prof of law and gov’t @ Durham, “A Defence of Jury Nullification,” Res Publica 10, 2004, [, , ] Therefore, racial prejudice and the effects of racial discrimination may cause juries to acquit, as well as to convict, defendants who deserve to be treated otherwise. Indeed, juries can acquit or convict for any reason, as they need not offer reasons in rendering general verdicts. However, there are procedural protections against unsafe convictions for cases where no reasonable grounds for the conviction can be ascertained by an appellate court. If juries mistakenly convict a defendant, the defendant may be set free on appeal. Moreover, great care is taken in voir dire, at least in the US, to prevent potential jurors who have prejudicial views from sitting on juries.
AT Tea Party DA The link is inaccurate – jury nullification is a boon to left-wingers just as much Conrad 14 Conrad, Clay S, author and attorney, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, published by Cato Institute, 2014 edition, originally published 1998, ProQuest. [, , ] The Senate and Congressional hearings into the Ruby Ridge and Waco operations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, combined with the bombing of the Murrah Federal Center in Oklahoma City, revealed opposed but related concerns about excesses of government and of the burgeoning militia movement in the country. Jury independence (and particularly FIJA) was falsely identified with the “militia movement” and the extreme far-right in a number of television and radio broadcasts, in spite of the fact that many prominent attorneys and judges, including Alan Scheflin, William Kunstler, Leonard Weinglass, Michael Tigar, David Kairys, Tony Serra, and David Bazelon have promoted and praised jury independence as an important bulwark of American liberty. While jury nullification may have become headline news, it was almost always inaccurately portrayed, and occasionally wrongly identified with a political ideology which was often its antithesis.
AT Labor/Unions Backlash against jury nullification used to destroy labor movements, empirics Conrad 14 summarizes Conrad, Clay S, author and attorney, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine, published by Cato Institute, 2014 edition, originally published 1998, ProQuest. [, , ] It has been suggested that countering the reluctance of juries to convict in labor cases was one factor motivating the decision in Sparf , or perhaps leading to the court’s decision to hear this otherwise unimportant homicide case at all. 162 The government had shown great interest in defeating the labor movement. U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney personally argued the government’s position in Debs’ Habeas Corpus motion, 163 and the notedly conservative Fuller court (which had just decided United States v. E.C. Knight Co. 164 ) could be presumed to favor the railroads over the unions. Sparf would have been an ideal case to choose to limit the discomfiting tenacity of independent juries. The Sparf decision had only a marginal effect on the labor movement. Opponents of labor, observing the success of their efforts against the ARU, turned from pursuing criminal conspiracy prosecutions against union leaders, and increasingly sought injunctions against labor organizations after 1894. According to Felix Frankfurter and Nathan Greene, in 118 labor injunction cases in a 27-year period (representing the minority of the injunctions covered by reported opinions), “seventy ex parte restraining orders were granted without notice to the defendants or opportunity to be heard. In but twelve of these instances, was the bill of complaint accompanied by supporting affidavits; in the remaining fifty-eight cases, the court’s interdict issued upon the mere submission of a bill expressing conventional formulas, frequently even without a verification.”
AT Racism Juries acquit racist defendants of civil rights violations – legal solutions like jury nullification negate established legislation in favor of communal values, causes retrenchment of racist ideology in law Brooks 04 Thom, prof of law and gov’t @ Durham, “A Defence of Jury Nullification,” Res Publica 10, 2004, [, , ] Of course, not all concerns that critics highlight about jury trials can be acceptable, in particular regarding racist juries.56 For example, and more commonly in the American South,57 convictions for alleged violations of civil rights legislation were often met by jury nullification. Perhaps the judicial process is not best suited for the task of combating segregation: when rulings began to disallow segregation, many of them were unenforceable. N. W. Barber says: ‘desegregation would have been better effected through statutory and executive action, which could have provided a comprehensive and enforceable solution to the problem; such a solution, however, was not immediately forthcoming’.58 One of the problems, according to Peter Bachrach, was that the purpose of civil rights rulings and legislation ‘was to change, by use of the law, ingrained behavior patterns of the community, rather than to reflect – which is the objective of the jury trial – attitudes and mores of the community’.59 If the jury is to give expression to community standards that are racist, then jury verdicts may well be racially prejudiced, which is clearly unacceptable. Moreover, many have noted the phenomenon of African-American juries voting to acquit defendants in light of damning evidence to the contrary, most notably the acquittal of former Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry, who was caught on FBI videotape smoking cocaine.60 In these instances, Paul Butler argues, jury nullification is a useful tool to address ‘antisocial conduct’, in particular racial discrimination. ‘for pragmatic and political reasons, the black commu-nity is better off when some nonviolent lawbreakers remain in the community rather than go to prison’.61
No Solvo Juries agree with judges most of the time anyway [this card might also help affs argue against ‘wrong decision’-type arguments from the neg] Brooks 04 Thom, prof of law and gov’t @ Durham, “A Defence of Jury Nullification,” Res Publica 10, 2004, [, , ] Nevertheless, when held to this standard, juries may be said to make ‘correct’ decisions–that is, they agree with the decisions of judges–at least seventy five percent of the time.39 This is not to say that juries incorrectly decide one quarter of all cases, but rather that judges would have decided differently in those cases. In these instances, critics charge juries with making mistakes. That is, verdicts delivered by juries that differ from verdicts judges would have delivered are thought to be not only a disagreement between juries and judges, but a disagreement where the judges are thought to be correct. Of course, the decisions of judges are not always correct and, therefore, their decisions cannot provide us with an absolute measure of what a correct decision would be in any particular case.
Promises Perverse decisions are tantamount to re-writing the law, and juries are breaking their promise Brooks 04 summarizes Thom, prof of law and gov’t @ Durham, “A Defence of Jury Nullification,” Res Publica 10, 2004, [, , ] One major problem for critics of jury trials is the fact that, on occasion, juries decide cases differently from the way professional judges would have done, rendering so-called ‘perverse verdicts’. Critics argue that when this happens, juries are effectively rewriting the law, something neither juries nor judges should do.70 For example, Judge R. J. O’Hanlon says that: it is often put forward as one of the merits of the jury system that a jury can bring about changes in the law of the land by refusing to enforce laws which appear to them to be unjust or oppressive in some way … . What this means in reality is that the jury, having taken an oath that they will ‘true verdicts give according to the evidence’ have broken their oath by refusing to give effect to the law of the land. They have usurped the role of parliament which is entrusted by the people with the task of making laws which are in conformity with the will of the people. However pardonable such action on the part of the jury may be in defiance of an oppressive and autocratic regime, it is indefensible in a modern democracy where fundamental rights and freedoms are protected by the country’s constitution.7