Comment on Jury unanimously acquits Churchill statue spray-painter

• FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  There are lots of good reasons for jury trials, I think the biggest one is that you get a slice of the population rather than whatever your population of judges happens to be. What you’re talking about amounts to jury nullification, which is a fact of jury trials but I don’t think many people would say is the purpose of them. The textbook distinction is that the judge interprets the law, and the jury decides facts as needed under that interpretation.

  I think it would be good to think what might happen if someone were up in court for having spray-painted “deport all immigrants”, or a similar far-right slogan. (Perhaps more offensive? Perhaps more aggressive? You can imagine many.)

  Such a person ought to be treated the same in the eyes of the law as anyone else performing the same actions - as long as his slogans don’t meet the threshold of specific hate crimes, he’d just be someone with a strongly held belief that his political leaders needed to change course. If a jury of his peers happened to be all Reform voters, that should not acquit him, in my opinion.

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  • tomenzgg@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    No, I definitely get what you mean; it makes sense.

    I just…don’t know how you get around the fact that there’s nothing, really, to stop that. Theoretically, that’s why you have multiple jurors: as you said, to get a slice of the population (and, hopefully, offset or dampen any bias a homogeneous group would, otherwise, have). Having a properly diverse slice is, theoretically, the mechanism.

    But – in addition to that – I think what you’re envisioning only fully and always works if we can assume that the laws are fair and that all those carrying out the law are working from good faith. Judges, being more knowledgeable of the law, make sense to interpret the law but I’ve definitely seen some absurdly biased reading of particular laws, as well; what do we do, then, as recourse if a blatant mistreatment of justice is occurring but, well, that’s what the law’s been interpreted as and, as the system exists, that’s what we’re supposed to take on its face? (I don’t know that it really fits since, in the end, it was the judge who made the decision and you’ve already mentioned they should be the ones to interpret but I’ve seen lawyers argue that those later found innocent should remain sentenced because they didn’t prove said innocence during their trial so, based on the procedure/practice of things, their innocence should be dismissed/ignored: injusticewatch.org/…/missouri-attorney-general-fi…)

    I think, ultimately, I’m less worried about a sense that it sets any kind of precedent for the law being interpreted on whim is the fact that it was a slice of the population. Generally, you’ll probably have someone who may want to more closely hew what the law is. The fact that the whole jury was in agreement might point to an issue with something and allow the people to otherwise push back on how their government is serving them. But I’d suspect outcomes like this to be outliers, rather than the norm.

    (this is only personal – and, therefore, incidental to our conversation – but having seen the lack of easy recourse for people to put a check on their government over my time of being alive has made me more sympathetic to some avenues to overturn judges’ interpretation of the law, in some manner; I am slightly envious of the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty allowing to push back on the courts in a way that the U. S.'s congress simply cannot)

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    • FishFace@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Mm thanks for this

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