Maybe eleven. Plus me. Starting a week from today.
I’ve been called to sit in judgment of some poor schmuck who’s run afoul of the law. I don’t know who or how or whether he did it or not. I’ll find out all that next week, but won’t be able to tell you anything about it until it’s all over—if I actually get picked for the jury.
If I do get picked, it will be only the second time. The first, in California 17 years ago, was on a DUI case and our verdict was guilty.
According to the instructions the judge gave us on that occasion, it “need not” have been, even though we all found beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did drive under the influence. We were told that if we found guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, we “may, but need not” return a guilty verdict. I took that to mean we had the right of jury nullification, if we wanted to exercise it. Nobody was going to be in a position to second-guess us if we returned a repeat DUI offender to the streets. At least, not legally. Of course, none of us objected to the DUI law, so the question never came up.
I’ve seen a lot of arguments about jury nullification, and both sides have good points but I think the integrity of the citizen jury is unduly compromised by making a verdict subject to review based on the jurors’ reasons for voting the way they did—especially if the result is acquittal. I may think the system today goes overboard sometimes in tilting the scales in favor of defendants, but there is good reason why we make it harder for the prosecution than for the defense in criminal cases.
Years ago when we lived in Fairbanks I became friends with a local fully-informed-jurors activist who was later convicted of jury tampering.
How did he commit jury tampering? He took to standing outside the courthouse handing out FIJA pamphlets.
He never referenced particular cases, and had no way of knowing which person he spoke to was a juror on any particular case; the only way for him to do so would be to attend those trials, and the authorities were already preventing that. Either the jury-tampering law in Alaska is overly broad (and thus in need of some jury nullification in its own right) or my friend’s trial was an outrageous miscarriage of justice. It left a bad taste in my mouth about the Alaska judicial system’s view of the citizen jury, and it’s probably just as well I was never called to serve while we lived there.
I’ll be very interested to learn how jurors are instructed here in Georgia.
