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Food Not Bombs trial rescheduled after too many jurors objected to $500 fine for feeding homeless
(www.houstonchronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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So the DA is just allowed to say, "I don't like any of my choices in this jury pool" and that's just okay?? That doesn't sound like a fair trial at all. It's like grabbing the stack of lottery tickets from behind the counter and starting to scratch them off. When somebody comes to make you stop you just say, "it's all good. I'm just trying to find one I like before I decide to play the lottery today."
The process of jury selection is complex. It good that it’s this way, however it can be abused if the system itself (meant to keep it working properly) breaks down. One of the most important elements in that is that the officers of the court (both lawyers and the judge) are operating honestly and in good faith.
So, you see the problem.
To over-simplify, as I understand things...
There's a variety of reasons a juror can be rejected, with one of them being "the juror is not willing to follow the law, as written". This seems to be what's happening here, the law says that if a person does X, the penalty is fine Y, and these jurors are saying "I would not issue fine Y even if you prove they did X."
To an extent, this is the system working they way it's supposed to, one of the checks on unreasonable laws is being unable to find people willing to enforce them in good conscience.
Although that process can also be heavily abused, such as when all white juries would routinely find white defendants not guilty when they very obviously lynched black people.
How simple can this be?
Could I convict someone for a victimless crime that helped people? The answer is yes. Yes of course I could. I could also have an affair, blow up my car, do a naked tap dance on my boss' desk, tell my kids that I don't love them, and finish the day trying to underwater basketweave.
If the laws of the physics does not prevent me from doing something the answer to the question "can I x" is yes. If the question is it likely well that is a much different story.
People have to learn how to jury nullify properly
Unfortunately this is a very cut and dry indication of intention of jury nullification, and that is a reason to dismiss a potential juror. They shouldn't have said anything and then nullified once they actually got on the jury.
Not even intent, even the risk that someone has the ideological basis that could justify nullification in that case is enough to throw them out.
It's actually why it took a while to prosecute the boston marathon bombers, because the jury selection ran face first into the fact that the jury pool was bostoners and bostoners lean pretty sharply against the death penalty, which is what the prosecutor was after.
Both parties get a certain number (like 2 or 3) chances to excuse anyone, no reason required. Outside of that, you're raising technical reasons to the judge and the judge does the dismissing. If the judge doesn't buy the reason and the other party doesn't object, they may just end up on the jury.
This makes sense to me, but I also think that you shouldn't be able to dismiss the jury en masse more than once. Jury pools are what, 20-30 people? If they can't find 12 people and/or set 1 doesn't work out for some reason and the judge agrees, you get one more shot and either accept the hand you're dealt or drop the case.
When something of similar scope happens to the defense they can ask for a change of venue, and if it's granted that's it. The trial proceeds.
This is picked up on elsewhere in the thread that basically this, itself, is a form of jury nullification. If the law is so bad that they can't ever get a jury together to try a case, then that law is unenforceable and effectively nullified.
This sounds like an abstraction of a general "problem" in the system. If you set a law with consequences that no reasonable person would think is proportionate to the crime no jury will convict someone of the crime. It was a real problem back when the death penalty was too broadly applied.
One particular thing with the abortion ban debates that is overlooked is how common women killing children under the age of one used to be before birth control/abortion legality. In those eras courts (usually somewhere between 1850 and early 1900's) had to put new laws on the books to lower their punishments well off of full murder convictions because juries would refuse to apply full murder charges broadly to the category because at some level they accepted it as kind of a natural but volitle reaction to misery beyond the control of the person that the juries were very empathetic towards because a woman's lot being particularly miserable was an accepted social norm.
These "problems" have ways of figuring themselves out. If you can't reliably find a jury you have to change the law.