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Jury Nullification Paper

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Jury Nullification Paper April 25, 2011

Jury Nullification defined when juries believe a case is unjust or wrong and may acquit a defendant who violated the law. Jury nullification has been an option of a jury in the United States. The jury play a fundamental role in upholding and interpreting the laws the founders of American government outlined in that most sacred of documents. Today society find it imperative to question to what extent a jury may take these laws and make them their own. That a jury may so easily subject laws created through intense discussion and hindsight to so capricious a dismissal leads to question whether jury nullification, in fact undermines the rule of law imbedded in the American Constitution. Seen in this light it is not strange that the courts in the past and the present have discouraged it. At no time juries conferred with lawmaking authority, yet the repeated use of jury nullification results in the altercation of laws made by the proper government bodies. The over-use of jury nullification would result in the weakening of the American democratic system. Racial-based jury nullification has been an ongoing debate for quite some time. Though jury nullification involves members of the jury interpreting the law and coming up with an agreement of what they believe is the best solution of a court case based on what perception of justice, this practice does have some good points in which it benefits the criminal justice system. In a system that contains statistics and reports that prove that discrimination does exist in terms of a person’s race affecting the length and severity of the sentence assigned to him or her, racial-based jury nullification may be beneficial in

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