Topic: Prosecuting advocating jury nullification as "jury tampering"

[Pandora]

Link via rayra.

Julian P. Heicklen, a 79-year-old retired chemistry professor, has often stood on a plaza outside the United States Courthouse in Manhattan, holding a “Jury Info” sign and handing out brochures that advocate jury nullification, the controversial view that if jurors disagree with a law, they may ignore their oaths to follow it and may acquit a defendant who violated it.

Then, last year, federal prosecutors had Mr. Heicklen indicted, charging that his activity violated the law against jury tampering. Lawyers assisting him have sought dismissal of the case on First Amendment grounds.

But now prosecutors are offering their first detailed explanation for why they charged Mr. Heicklen, arguing in a brief that his “advocacy of jury nullification, directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without Constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.”

“His speech is not protected by the First Amendment,” prosecutors wrote.

“No legal system could long survive,” they added, “if it gave every individual the option of disregarding with impunity any law which by his personal standard was judged morally untenable.”

...

Mr. Heicklen, who could face a six-month sentence if convicted, has asked for a jury trial. Ms. Mermelstein, opposing that demand, cited as one reason Mr. Heicklen’s ardent stance that juries should nullify. He would probably “urge a jury to do so in a case against him,” she wrote.

Well, duh.  Isn't that what every defendant tries to do?  Get the jury to invalidate the case against him?

[Glock32]

Since the state willfully and regularly disregards its own laws, and the courts routinely function as merely a backup legislature, I see no moral quandary about jurors dropping their own turd into the punch bowl. Actually, I find it quite rich that these judicial types would pretend to lecture us on legal propriety when they are so in the habit of inventing new powers out of whole cloth. We no longer have any real check against the authority of the state by official, electoral means -- just look at Congressional negligence in the face of this Administration's wanton disregard for the Constitution -- so it stands to reason that things like jury nullification will emerge as a sort of ad hoc pushback.

[Libertas]

Since the state willfully and regularly disregards its own laws, and the courts routinely function as merely a backup legislature, I see no moral quandary about jurors dropping their own turd into the punch bowl. Actually, I find it quite rich that these judicial types would pretend to lecture us on legal propriety when they are so in the habit of inventing new powers out of whole cloth. We no longer have any real check against the authority of the state by official, electoral means -- just look at Congressional negligence in the face of this Administration's wanton disregard for the Constitution -- so it stands to reason that things like jury nullification will emerge as a sort of ad hoc pushback.