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This short briefing outlines basic arguments from many points of view surrounding the increasingly common legal question of whether or not to exclude those who are not vaccinated against COVID-19 from juries.
Please keep in mind that FIJA's wheelhouse is jury rights—not infectious disease, public health, or any other medical question. Consequently, this briefing is not designed to address various medical questions about COVID-19 or vaccinations against COVID-19.
It is, however, intended to help ensure that discussion of our already nearly extinct jury rights—and our right of jury nullification in particular—get a place in the conversation and are weighed along with other factors as this important and concerning problem is worked out.
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After many changes of public date being listed on Amazon, I pleased to share with you that Professor Michael Huemer's new book entitled Justice before the Law is now available! In this latest work, Huemer argues that when justice and law are in conflict, justice must take priority. You may not be surprised to know that jury nullification gets heavy coverage in this book, as we discussed in a webinar with Professor Huemer earlier this year (the audio gets significantly better a few minutes in after our guest switches microphones). I don't have dates scheduled yet, but be on the lookout in the coming weeks for an online book discussion group for Justice before the Law.
Full disclosure: the link above is to the Amazon Smile website, which allows you to choose a charity that will get a tiny donation from Amazon (a little over 17 cents in this case, if I've done my math correctly) for each of your eligible purchases. If you don't use Amazon Smile and would like to, you can search for Fully Informed Jury Association (yes, the full name—sorry!) and select us as your charity of choice. If you don't use Amazon Smile and don't want to, you can just replace the word 'smile' in the URL with the usual 'www'. hich of the previously mentioned "buckets" do you think this case likely fits in? Based on what I've read so far, I'm leaning toward classifying this as a probable or possible instance of grand jury nullification, but I'm still reading up on the case.
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I cannot repeat this too much:
Without trial by jury, there is no jury nullification!
One of the persistent effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the continued denial of the supposedly Constitutionally-guaranteed right to trial by jury—even to those who are behind bars yet remain unconvicted!
Until now, the most I have seen have been individual cases reviewed for COVID-related speedy trial violations, and those have been relatively easily poopooed by judges. (For more information on how they do that, I refer you to this Frequently Asked Question on the FIJA website.)
This mass action, though, gives me a little bit of hope that perhaps seeing hundreds of cases in aggregate instead of a handful one by one will give the general public, and perhaps even the courts, a better understanding of how serious the situation has become.
If courts are allowed to treat everything they deem to be "an emergency" as a valid reason to commit mass rights violations such as we are seeing with speedy trial violations, we can expect to live in a perpetual state of emergency where we have virtually no rights. This indefinite detention of untried and unconvicted individuals MUST END.
