Re: Jacob Appelbaum in Germany
At 05:16 PM 1/8/2014, coderman wrote:
in the US court system, is there an equivalent of jury nullification applied to a judicial ruling?
that is to say: is it possible to plead guilty, but a judge acting to nullify a perceived unjust law, could find you not guilty?
A judge who wanted to do that could dismiss the case instead of asking for a plea. IANAL, but I suspect that a judge who allows a case to get as far as asking the defendents how they plead isn't going to reject a guilty plea. Another way to do what the Quakers wanted to do would have been to plead "no contest" instead of guilty, but I'm sure they had deeply considered what to do beforehand.
i have spoken exstensively to lawyers about using this tactic they say it is very problematic > the people that sit on juries are not informed that they can in fact nullify AND if a lawyer sees a possibility in an instance of a case they can get at best reprimanded by the judge if there is any 'jury tampering' perceived the courts have nullified the jury nullification law if the citizenry were in fact knowledgable and educated that would help the issue and change a lot of things actually - the education system sucks of course so... and its such an odd thing because people put such incredible "faith" in the legal system and they know so little about how it "functions" i have done some work in the jail/court support area and there are a ton of things happening in the courts that need changing there is barely an analysis of how screwed up the system really is - some volunteers are doing great work in statistics especially regarding sexual assault cases BUT it is only a beginning on what needs to happen for anything to get better On 1/10/14, Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> wrote:
At 05:16 PM 1/8/2014, coderman wrote:
in the US court system, is there an equivalent of jury nullification applied to a judicial ruling?
that is to say: is it possible to plead guilty, but a judge acting to nullify a perceived unjust law, could find you not guilty?
A judge who wanted to do that could dismiss the case instead of asking for a plea.
IANAL, but I suspect that a judge who allows a case to get as far as asking the defendents how they plead isn't going to reject a guilty plea. Another way to do what the Quakers wanted to do would have been to plead "no contest" instead of guilty, but I'm sure they had deeply considered what to do beforehand.
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Cari Machet