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... provides the necessary protection of liberties. But legislatures will always confirm the constitutionality of their own acts. And the oaths sworn to uphold the Constitution by judges and public servants have historically been only as good as the power to enforce such oaths. Nor are free elections adequate to prevent tyranny without jury veto power, because elections come only periodically and give no guarantee of repealing the damage done. Additionally, the second body of legislators are likely to be as bad as the first since they are exposed to the same temptations and use the same tactics to gain office.
Further, the jury's veto power protects minorities from 'the body of the people, operating by the majority against the minority. ' (James Madison, June 8, 1789. ) Twelve men taken randomly from the population will represent both friends and opponents of the party in power. With fully informed juries the government can exercise no powers over the people without the consent of the people. Trial by jury is trial by the people. When juries are not allowed to judge law it becomes trial by the government 'In short, if the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law. ' (Spooner, 1852) (Excerpted from 'Jury Power' by L. & J.
Osburn) What all of the facts above go out and say would be that people would of needed the jury nullification even back in the old days before it was brought about. The facts go to prove that no man that is on a jury should have to determine the law and the person who is on trial too. "Men do not make laws. They do but discover them. Laws must be justified by something more than the will of the majority. They must rest on the eternal foundation of righteousness. That state is most fortunate in its form of government which has the aptest instruments for the discovery of law. " Calvin Coolidge, to the Massachusetts State Senate, January 7, 1914 This was written from this man so that he would speak his own opinion and in America that can happen because we are a free country and this man was right and yet wrong.
Man dose make the laws but yet they only make them after discovering that what someone did or if something happened they think of something that they can help fix it so that it will not happen again and if it dose happen again then they will have a punishment for that thing. Does jury nullification contribute to, rather than mitigate, such judicial misbehavior? No, because it is part of the system of checks and balances itself -- a check against the bias of judges and the irrationality and corruption that creeps steadily into the law, as irresponsible legislators and judges think about things other than justice. Jury nullification is not a violation of the rule of law because it is part of the rule of law. It represents a basic misconception of the principle of the 'rule of law' itself to say that it means that everyone absolutely must obey the law until the law can be changed by the appropriate processes. Indeed, that conception of the rule of law would forbid civil disobedience, which was justified by Martin Luther King, quoting St.
Augustine, that, 'An unjust law is no law at all. ' But how can we have the rule of law if we accept something like that? How can people just go around judging for themselves whether a law is just or not? The answer is, that they have to, and that is simply the principle of moral conscience. The rule of law is not contrary to that; for the rule of law is not an injunction to blind obedience.
Instead, the rule of law is a principle of the limitation of the authority of government. To be 'ruled by laws, not by men, ' is the old expression. Now, a jury nullifying a law or a protester practicing civil disobedience is not engaged in ruling. Instead, they are doing the precise opposite: negating the instructions and actions of government. The principle of the rule of law does the same kind of thing, for it means that the authority and power of government and of individuals in office is limited to those spheres, those issues, and those actions that are specified by the law. The rule of law denies to government unlimited or discretionary power and authority.
The rule of law is thus part of a system of checks and balances to prevent dictatorship and despotism. Because of that, it is curiously the case that you do not need to have laws to have the rule of law: for the whole system of Common Law developed through the practice of the courts in considering claims that someone had committed a wrong. The original purpose of trial by jury in the Magna Carta was similar. The threat, indeed, addressed by the Magna Carta was of the laws and judges of King 'peri fran. htm' l 'england'. If Magna Carta juries could not nullify the laws of King John, or ignore the instructions and rulings of his judges, trial by jury would have been a useless protection.
But the Barons, in obtaining King John's pledge, as Lysander Spooner wrote in 1852, 'were engaged in no such senseless work as that. ' The jury is the last line of defense, the last check and balance, against tyrannical government, if, that is, it is charged with determining the justice of a case and not just with blindly applying the law as given by a judge. It was become a very interesting perversion of the sytem of checks and balances when, as we are told, the Constitution means whatever the Supreme Court says it means but that we are then expected to obey without resistance. Since the Supreme Court has in general, since the New Deal, interpreted the Constitution to mean exactly the opposite of its original purpose, which had been to establish a federal government of limite...
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