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>Indeed, and I suspect as more people learn about jury nullification, the world will grow more just.

One would hope, but back in the day it was a powerful tool to do the opposite where juries disagreeing with the law would find minorities guilty when they obviously weren't.



At least there’s an appeals process which can potentially remedy that. It’s far from perfect, but a jury’s power to convict is not absolute.


Appeals are generally based on erroneous judge's decisions, mostly pre-trial, but sometimes things like evidence foundation and objections during trial.

Appellate courts very rarely touch jury decisions. I know someone who was found guilty at trial and a week later a jury member wrote a letter saying she was persuaded to change her "not guilty" verdict by two other jury members who hadn't declared their relationship to each other, were using their cellphones in the jury room and had looked up the criminal history of the defendant in the newspapers (which turned out to be completely wrong). Even with that letter the trial court said it didn't affect the verdict, but in this case the appeals court made the rare decision to overrule. Interestingly they mentioned a racial issue too: "where a juror makes a clear statement that indicates he or she relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant, the Sixth Amendment requires that the no-impeachment rule give way in order to permit the trial court to consider the evidence of the juror's statement and any resulting denial of the jury trial guarantee."


Also the [general] requirement for a unanimous vote to convict makes this form of juror action quite uncommon. By contrast a single juror can cause a jury to be unable to convict.


It's harder to swing things that way because conviction needs to be unanimous.




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