America’s Toxic Divide Reaches the Jury Room
This is a post about jury nullification. Also if you’re an OG CGP Gray viewer, the video title “Watching this could disqualify you from jury duty” (https://youtu.be/uqH\_Y1TupoQ?si=\_jEeyhnJ\_a9bzyBd) is probably not going to work anymore as “65% of people were willing to take the law into their own hands as opposed to following the judge’s instructions, up from 52%.
In the criminal justice system, jurors are entitled to acquit defendants by deliberately rejecting evidence or refusing to apply the law, often by substituting their own sense of fairness—a concept known as jury nullification.” Just as an example from the article, the judge explicitly told the jury not to sentence, yet the jury disobeyed and triggered a mistrial.
Though jurors who reveal this intent are dismissed or never selected in the first place, pre-determined voting is increasingly the reality of America’s jury. Because political affiliation is becoming the deciding factor in many trials instead of deliberation, I fear not just that time is wasted from mistrial but the judicial system with juries has completely malfunctioned and will have dire consequences, including precedence as younger generations are a lot more inclined to nullify, if the political climate doesn’t calm down.
Though this last comment of mine feels tangential, I can’t help but find that this situation reflects America’s politics extremely well too: the inability, post-COVID, for understanding of other political opinions produces America’s political divide, so much so that elections aren’t won by swing voters or independents but by supercharging your party voter base to turn out for elections via fear mongering.