Yesterday, I said that the right to a trial by a jury of peers is a critical cornerstone of our society. True as that is, jury trial was intended to play an even more important role.

Simply put...

A jury has the right to decide whether the accused is guilty, and to decide whether the involved law is just.

Does that surprise you, as it did me? I'm no kid, and I consider myself pretty well-informed, but I once believed that, as many of us have heard in court, juries are to judge only the accused, not the law. Judges give those instructions to the jury… you are not to judge the law, just the accused.

Those judges are quite simply telling a lie to the jury. I will refer you to scholarly evidence later in this essay, but let me give you the "meat" of it. This right of a jury has a long historical basis, and was a critically important aim of the founders of our nation. This right has been tested a great many times, and there is a history of dramatic cases where it was used repeatedly to rid our country of ugly, unconstitutional laws. The right is usually referred to as "jury nullification".

The right is real, and valid, and constitutional, and is being kept secret by people we should be able to trust.

Why is it so important? It is the defense of the people against unfair laws. Are there unfair laws? In this time of rampant government, most of us have no way of knowing about unfair laws until we happen to run afoul of one of them by accident… but there are thousands of people in prison today, convicted in cases where the jurors thought the law was wrong… but the jury thought they had to abide by the letter of the law, whether it was unjust or not. In fact, a jury has a right to aquit the defendant if they think the law is unjust, or doesn't fit this case. The jury has the complete decision!

This jury's right is a defense against intrusive, oppressive government. It is a defense against governmental agencies run amok, and most of us are aware of some of the horror stories about actions by the ATF, the FBI, the FDA, etc.

The recent trial of Ed Rosenthal, in which the Federal judge refused to allow presentation of many relevant facts, is a good example. When, after the verdict, the jury members discovered the information that was withheld from them, they were furious. It seems clear that if they had been given all the facts, they would have rendered a not guilty verdict.

It is a citizen's defense, and it was intended that way by the writers of our Constitution. For many years, judges gave the proper instructions to juries… they verbally instructed the jury that they had the right to judge the law. A single Supreme Court case decided, in a heated split-decision, that judges need not tell juries about that right. It seems that the practice then died out, and that few judges now inform juries of their right, and many give instructions to the contrary.

Still another Constitutional right lost… aborted over a long period of time, by government that accepts no limits on its own power.

The astounding part of this is… that this very important citizen right was allowed to disappear almost completely out of sight… not taught in school, not publicized, not maintained by judges, not protested by judicial scholars.

Fortunately for all of us, there are organizations and individuals fighting to let us know of this right. I learned about it through the Libertarian party, which has the following as part of it's platform:

... "we urge the assertion of the common-law right of juries to judge not only the facts but also the justice of the law. In all cases to which the government is a party, the judge should be required to inform the jurors of their common law right to judge the law, as well as the facts, and to acquit a criminal defendant, and to find against the government in a civil trial, whenever they deem the law unjust or oppressive."

but there is a Web site you owe it to yourself to check out. The organization is FIJA (Fully-Informed Jury Association). Read some of the material… convince yourself of the truth and importance of this right.

If you react as I did, you'll get angry as hell.