Jury nullification
A repost, but an important one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullificationOpen linkView original on lemmy.worldSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on lemmy.worldhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullificationOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
8 replies
One of those things every US citizen should know about, but also know to never admit they know about, prior to being brought into jury duty. (If a judge even suspects a potential juror has heard of jury nullification, they'll throw the juror out prior to trial).
Judges are fallible. The law is fallible. And law and morality are not one and the same.
I was on a grand jury on once, and I tried to convince the rest of them not to indict people for selling drugs. Just, the war on drugs is a catastrophe and I didn't want to be a part of it.
Every one of those mother fuckers was like "oh but we have to do what the lawyers said" and "I just want to go home". One of them wanted to buy weed from me because presumably that's the only reason I wouldn't want to indict people for selling weed.
Anyway, grand jury is simple majority so they all went through. And even if we had said no, the prosecutor can just try to get an indictment with a new grand jury. (So all those times cops didn't go to trial for murder because the grand jury didn't indict? Bullshit. The state can keep trying.)
The American legal system is a farce
Edit: fix two typos
yeah people underestimate the social pressure of holding out in a jury. People really fucking wanna go home and get on with their lives, which is a glaring issue with the legal system but…
I'll always love this ad for Better Call Saul where in espousing the merits of Jury Duty, Saul undoes the whole thing by imploring the audience to investigate the topic of Jury Nullification.
As an anecdotal aside, I once was part of a hung jury and it was strangely satisfying.
I believe knowing this is an information hazard. In the sense that the knowledge of this operation is sufficient to dismiss you from a jury.
"Information hazard" is a term from the Rational Altruist community that many wealthy people in the AI industry have paid attention to, as well as people like Sam Bankmanfried and at least one cult (the zizians). Despite a lack of reasonable evidense/logic to their claims.
Thus using the term seriously is an information hazard, in that it leads others to not take you seriously.
Fucking "rationalists" and their stupid claim that knowing things is harmful. Also, most lawyers aren't asking about jury nullification, because people who hear that term are probably gonna look it up (giving them a chance to do it)... This isn't a movie.
Stupid argument. Clearly information can be harmful. If you tell a deeply depressed person how to easily kill themselves is obviously harmful to that person.
The court will ask you if you know anything that may cause you to make a judgement based in bias not the law (or something similar). They are asking the question without asking the question.
Also the original source of a word or idea does not invalidate the word/idea. Fucking Plato invented feminism in the same chapter he argued for eugenics. Any rational person would agree that this source is not sufficient to disregard the entire idea. But by your own admission we have already established you don't support rationalism.
Knowing how to kill yourself won't increase or decrease the outcome of depression, because that knowledge isn't driving the depression. The problem is the depression, its causes, and its severity (jumping off tall place, or running into traffic isn't difficult to figure out). Knowing methodologies is of marginal influence to how depressed the person is. Severity of the condition is the primary factor to the outcome.
Also, fuck no I don't support the "Rational Altruist" or the "Effective Altruism" movements because I don't get caught up in shitty ass word games and poorly crafted "thought experiments".
Those people are idiots. Those groups are full of really smart dumb people.
Also "Rationalism" in general has a fraught history, from Ayn Rand to Economic Rationalism. People are better off acknowledging that they're not always rational and shouldn't seek to be.