1
I don't think I've ever seen the first possible case of jury nullification this early in any year I've been working with FIJA. That may have happened on Wednesday in the city of Bristol in England.
Four protesters opted for a trial by jury rather than to have their case decided by a magistrate. They were charged wtih criminal damage of a public statue of slave trader and philanthropist Edward Colston, whose significant contributions to the city were largely made possible by his profit from his involvement in the Royal African Company, which took roughly 80,000 men, women, and children from Africa and sold them as slaves.
Some of you may find yourself applauding the jury's verdicts in this case. Others may be outraged. No need to email me with your opinion of whether or not the jury did the right thing. I already know from the internet that many people disagree with the verdict.
I will just point out that if you find yourself with mixed feelings or strong opposition to this verdict... things like this are part the deal with juries and jury nullification.
We are all going to disagree with some juries' decisions sometimes. We are all going to disagree with some jurors' exercise of conscientious acquittal at least sometimes.
Yet these are crucial safeguards, not only in spite of our disagreements, but I would say because of them. To me that is part of the beauty of the jury system as it was intended. It is designed to err disproportionately in favor of the accused. A properly functioning jury system only allows the government to punish someone accused of a crime with widespread agreement of a jury that serves as the conscience of the community.
2
What is getting better in the American jury system? What is getting worse?
In last year's inaugural State of the American Jury System presentation, we established a baseline on the state of the American jury system. It was not great, to put it mildly—especially in light of measures imposed by government during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our knowledgeable panelists will update you in:
FIJA's second annual
State of the American Jury System presentation on
19 January 2022 at
noon Eastern / 11:00 am Central
10:00 am Mountain / 9:00 am Pacific
I currently anticipate this will be presented as a Zoom webinar and simultaneously livestreamed to FIJA's official Facebook page. If I get very brave, we may also livestream to our YouTube channel at the same time on an experimental basis.
Register on or before 18 January 2022 to join us on Zoom. If you are joining us on Facebook (or if you want to take your chances with YouTube, which I remind you may not work out), there is no need to register.
Registrants should expect an email during the week before the presentation with the information you need to join the webinar. I will also be sending reminder emails the day before and the morning of the presentation. The presentation will be recorded and posted to YouTube (assuming nothing goes wrong!) afterward, and I will send a link to all registrants as soon as it is available on YouTube.
3
Can you help educate the public by doing a little information bounty hunting of sorts? There are a number of jury-related questions for which we can find no definitive answer or for which the answer may change at any time.
For instance, do you know what is the longest length of time an American citizen has been held in pre-trial detention without being convicted? No? Me neither. The various government systems in the United States generally do not make that kind of data readily available to the public, let alone aggregated across all levels of government.
This year, though, we're going to try and put our collective wisdom and observations together to answer some of these kinds of questions. See, for example, the case I'm sharing with you in the fourth link this week, which is a great example of what might be submitted in answer to the pre-trial detention question.
Even though we can't definitively answer these questions without an exhaustive inventory of all U.S. trial records, we can at least share with the public the most egregious examples of these types of abuses that we know of by pooling our observations.
Click through to learn how you can contribute to this project and possibly score some FIJA swag in the process!
