From the DAILY BEAST:
… Retired Penn State chemistry professor Julian P. Heicklen, 78, was arrested by the feds earlier this year for alleged jury tampering, a charge that carries a maximum six-month prison sentence. He’s charged with standing outside the federal courthouse on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan (something he’s been doing on a fairly regular basis since 2009 without incident) and providing passersby with pamphlets that state:
“The judge will instruct the jury that it must uphold the law as he gives it. He will be lying. The jury must judge the law as well as the facts. Juries were instituted to protect citizens from the tyranny of the government. It is not the duty of the jury to uphold the law. It is the jury’s duty to see that justice is done … Once on a jury, must I use the law as given by the judge, even if I think it’s a bad law, or wrongly applied? The answer is ‘No.’ You are free to vote on the verdict according to your conscience.”
The basic idea of nullification springs from two bedrocks of the American system of jurisprudence: that jurors cannot be punished for and need not explain the verdict they deliver (which means nullification is to some extent in the eye of the beholder), and the “double jeopardy” clause of the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits a person from being tried twice for the same crime. In effect, nullification is when jury members return a verdict of “not guilty” not because of reasonable doubt, but because they believe a law is immoral or wrongly applied.…
Click here to read the full article.
