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Jury nullification of law in the United States (the term "jury nullification of law" is often shortened to "jury nullification," for purposes of brevity, even though it is the law being nullified and not the jury or its verdict) has its origins in colonial British America. Similar to British law, in the United States jury nullification occurs when a jury in a criminal case reaches a verdict contrary to the weight of evidence, sometimes because of a disagreement with the relevant law.〔"Jury nullification". Encarta dictionary. Microsoft Corporation. Archived from the original on 2009-11-01. Retrieved 2009-05-21.〕 The American jury draws its power of nullification from its right to render a general verdict in criminal trials, the inability of criminal courts to direct a verdict no matter how strong the evidence, the Fifth Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause, which prohibits the appeal of an acquittal, and the fact that jurors can never be punished for the verdict they return. ==In practice== The tradition of Jury nullification in the United States has its roots in the British legal system, specifically in a 1670 English case where Quakers were acquitted by a jury of violating a law which only permitted religious assemblies under the Church of England. In 1735 a journalist in the colony of New York was acquitted by a jury who nullified a law making it a crime to criticize public officials.〔 Later, colonial juries nullified the Navigation Acts which would have forced all trade with the colonies to pass through England for taxation.〔 Just prior to the Civil War northern juries sometimes refused to convict for violations of the Fugitive Slave Act because jurors felt the laws to be unjust. In 1851, 24 people were indicted for helping a fugitive escape from a jail in Syracuse, New York. The first four trials of the group resulted in three acquittals and one conviction, and the government dropped the remaining charges. Likewise, after a crowd broke into a Boston courtroom and rescued Anthony Burns, a slave, the grand jury indicted three of those involved, but after an acquittal and several hung juries, the government dropped the charges. During the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in the civil rights movement era, all-white juries acquitted white defendants accused of murdering blacks; however, the problem according to some scholars was: "...not in jury nullification, but in jury selection. The jury was not representative of the community..." During Prohibition, juries often nullified alcohol control laws, possibly as often as 60% of the time because of disagreements with the justice of the law. This resistance is considered to have contributed to the adoption of the Twenty-first amendment repealing the Eighteenth amendment which established Prohibition. Kalven's and Zeisel's study of the American jury found that juries acquitted when judges would have convicted in only nineteen percent of cases, and of these, only twenty-one percent of the acquittals were attributable to jury nullification. Jury nullification sometimes takes the form of a jury convicting the defendant of lesser charges than what the prosecutor sought. In the 21st century, many discussions of jury nullification center around drug laws that are considered by many to be unjust either in principle or because they disproportionately affect members of certain groups. A jury nullification advocacy group estimates that 3–4% of all jury trials involve nullification,〔 and a recent rise in hung juries (from an average of 5% to nearly 20% in recent years) is seen by some as being indirect evidence that juries have begun to consider the validity or fairness of the laws themselves (though other reasons such as the CSI effect may also be involved). In criminal cases, jury nullification arguments sometimes focus on the precise language of the jury instruction on the burden of proof. Many jury instructions on the issue of the burden of proof invite nullification arguments. According to these instructions juries ''must'' find the defendant not guilty if the case has not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Conversely the jury ''should'' find the defendant guilty if the case has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. The permissive language "should" arguably allows juries to consider nullification arguments. It is also possible to receive a specific jury instruction on nullification, though most judges simply avoid the topic and do not tell jurors of their power to judge the fairness of the law and how it is applied as well as to judge the facts of a case. During the Vietnam War era, many protestors, including Benjamin Spock, sought jury nullification. Spock was convicted of conspiracy to counsel, aid, and abet registrants to avoid the draft, after the judge instructed the jury to apply the law as he laid it down. However, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit overturned the conviction because the judge had committed prejudicial error in putting to the jury ten special yes-or-no questions. Eight defendants from Oakland, California were tried in 1969 for conspiracy to disrupt a draft induction center, and the jury acquitted after being told by the judge that it could acquit if it felt the defendants' actions were protected by the First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly. Likewise, in a case involving ten Seattle protestors accused of blocking a munitions train carrying bombs destined for Vietnam, the jury acquitted after the judge allowed the defendants to talk about their motives and permitted the defense to ask the jurors to invoke their consciences and object to the war by acquitting.〔 The Camden 28 were able to gain an acquittal despite the overwhelming evidence of their guilt. In at least one case, the judge allowed the jury to hear testimony about the Pentagon Papers and the nature of the Vietnam War. In one Vietnam-era case, the defense compared the defendants' actions in breaking into a government office to the Boston Tea Party, saying that no one "would say that breaking into a ship shouldn't be criminal, shouldn't be a crime," but that it was justified under the circumstances. There was also a case in which a jury voted 9-3 to acquit peace activists despite their admission that they poured blood in a military recruiting center. Several cases that were speculated to be instances of jury nullification included the prosecution of Washington D.C.’s former mayor, Marion Barry; the trial of Lorena Bobbitt; the prosecution of the police officers accused of beating Rodney King; the prosecution of two men charged with beating Reginald Denny in the resulting riots; the trial of the surviving Branch Davidian members; the trial of the Menendez brothers for the murder of their parents; and perhaps most famously, the O.J. Simpson murder trial. In the days preceding Jack Kevorkian's trial for assisted suicide in Michigan, Kevorkian's lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, told the press that he would urge the jury to disregard the law. Prosecutors prevailed upon the judge to enter a pretrial order banning any mention of nullification during the trial, but Fieger's statements had already been extensively reported in the media. In a 1998 article, Vanderbilt University Law Professor Nancy J. King wrote that "recent reports suggest jurors today are balking in trials in which a conviction could trigger a three strikes or other mandatory sentence, and in assisted suicide, drug possession, and firearms cases." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Jury nullification in the United States」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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