This month’s Wisconsin Lawyer has an article entitled “Nullification: A Jury’s ‘Secret’ Power,” by Erik R. Guenther. Here is an excerpt:
When “[t]he purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power – to make available the commonsense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps over-conditioned or biased response of a judge,”should the jury be kept in the dark about its fundamental power to decide the justness of the law as applied in a particular case? Should the power remain a secret (which is referred to only by a pejorative – nullification) rather than be acknowledged as an inherent, appropriate, and recognized part of the jury function?
Read the whole thing. The feds are still fighting hard to keep the jury’s power ‘secret’—so hard that free speech must be punished.
