Court Condemns Jury Acquittals As Social Protest Judges Told To Make Sure Jurors Do Not Ignore Evidence Or Law

Stepping into a legal debate with racial and political overtones, a federal appellate court in Manhattan declared Tuesday that judges have a duty to make sure jurors do not ignore the evidence or law in a case and instead impose their own values to acquit or convict a defendant.

In a ruling, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made the strongest denunciation yet by the federal courts of the practice known as “jury nullification,” in which a juror might vote, for example, to acquit a defendant for racial reasons rather than considering the strength of the case against him.

Calling such an action “a violation of a juror’s sworn duty to follow the law as instructed by the court,” Judge Jose Cabranes wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel that “trial courts have a duty to forestall or prevent such conduct” by admonishing or even dismissing jurors from a case.

The decision stemmed from a drug case tried in Albany, N.Y., in which jurors complained to the judge that one juror, the only black member of the panel, appeared opposed to applying the drug laws in the case, believing that the defendants had “a right to deal drugs,” the opinion said.

After interviewing the jurors, the trial judge concluded that the black juror felt that the defendants “were in a disadvantaged situation” and would not vote to convict “no matter what the evidence was.” The judge removed the juror and the 11 remain ing jurors voted to convict.

In its ruling Tuesday, the appellate court actually overturned the convictions, saying that the juror in this case may truly have been unpersuaded of the defendants’ guilt and that the judge was wrong to conclude that he was disregarding the law. But the appeals court said the judge was right to investigate the juror’s motivation, and used the case to take a strong stand against nullification.

“We categorically reject the idea that, in a society committed to the rule of law, jury nullification is desirable, or that courts may permit it to occur when it is within their power to prevent,” Cabranes wrote.

The decision comes as the legal community is embroiled in a debate over race and the justice system, and whether it is ever appropriate for jurors to intentionally disregard the law, in acquitting or convicting, as a form of protest.

The appellate court noted that jury nullification has deep roots in American jurisprudence. It protected fugitive slaves from being sent back to the South in the period before the Civil War, as northern juries refused to convict. But the court noted that there were also “shameful examples of how nullification has been used to sanction murder and lynching.” Among the cases cited were the hung juries in the 1964 trials of Byron De La Beckwith in Mississippi for the murder of Medgar Evers.

“It’s a two-edged sword,” said Burt Neubourne, professor at New York University School of Law. “It’s become, we can’t live with it and we can’t live without it. We acknowledge that jury nullification can be the ultimate defense against government oppression, but we also fear it because it’s corrosive of the rule of law.”

The debate intensified recently when a George Washington University law professor, Paul Butler, who is black, wrote that black jurors should, in certain nonviolent cases, acquit black defendants as a way of counterbalancing racism in the criminal justice system.

Randall Kennedy, who teaches race and the law at Harvard University Law School and is also black, recently attacked Butler’s position. He argued that jury nullification, even as a form of civil disobedience, is immoral and self-destructive for black people.

The appeals court said that a judge could dismiss a juror for failing to adhere to the evidence and the law even after secret deliberations in a case have begun.

But it placed a heavy burden on judges to make a solid case that a juror intended to disregard the law, because even beginning to question jurors about their intentions would mean invading the historic secrecy of the deliberative process.