More: Two notable Supreme Court cases this week.
As reported by The Washington Post, the chair of the Republican-led House Oversight Committee is examining two activist groups based in Washington, D.C., for allegedly hosting what he labeled “jury nullification training sessions,” arguing that their guidance to potential jurors constitutes an unlawful attempt to undermine federal prosecutors.
The committee leader in question, Rep. James Comer (R–Ky.), has singled out groups known as Free DC and Harriet’s Wildest Dreams because, in Comer’s words, they advocate that “potential jurors should not decide impartially by applying the law as instructed to the facts presented in the case, but instead should be guided by their subjective beliefs and activist agendas.”
If you can believe it, numerous eminent figures from America’s founding era would have aligned with those D.C. activists.
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The debate over jury nullification centers on whether there is a proper place within our legal framework for a jury to acquit not because the evidence of guilt is lacking, but because the jury believes the underlying law, or the way it is enforced, to be unconstitutional.
In 1791, the influential Founding Father James Wilson, who helped shape both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, delivered a widely discussed lecture at the College of Philadelphia. “Anyone required to obey a constitutional law is justified in refusing to obey an unconstitutional act of the legislature,” Wilson proclaimed. “When a question of this delicate nature arises, every person who is called to act has the right to judge.” Needless to say, jurors are among those “called to act” in precisely this fashion. Jurors thus possess their own “right to judge” the constitutionality of the law (and the prosecution) before them.
Thomas Jefferson offered a similar sentiment in a 1789 correspondence to Thomas Paine. “The trial by jury,” Jefferson wrote, “is the only anchor yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” How else could a jury hold the government accountable to constitutional principles than by assessing for itself the constitutionality of government actions, including those of the police and the prosecution?
According to Comer, a juror’s role is to mechanically “apply the law as instructed to the facts presented in the case.”
But that is not the position that Founding Fathers like Wilson and Jefferson endorsed. They contended that the juror’s task was to apply the Constitution to the government’s actions and to acquit when either the law or its enforcement falls short. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his seminal work Democracy in America, observed that the jury “puts the real direction of society in the hands of the governed, or a portion of the governed, and not in the hands of the government.”
In Other Legal Developments
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in two cases worth watching closely.
- On Tuesday, the justices considered Beaird v. United States, which asks how much deference judges should give to the U.S. Sentencing Commission’s commentary when a judge applies the federal sentencing guidelines in a defendant’s sentencing. This newsletter previously covered that case here.
- On Wednesday, the court tackled Salazar v. Paramount Global, which asks whether the website 247Sports violated the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 by sharing a user’s private data—such as what videos they watched—with Facebook. Past Injustice System coverage on that matter can be found here.
