Below is my column on campaigns on the left to enlist citizens in jury nullification. It is the latest assault on the integrity of our courts. Long supported by far-left law professors and pundits, it encourages potential jurors to disregard the evidence and the law in rendering a form of social justice.
Here is the column:
“You have this superpower.”
That statement from Qiana Johnson is part of reported training material for residents to engage in “jury nullification,” whereby jurors ignore the law and incriminating facts in a given case to nullify any prosecution.
Notably, Johnson is the newly elected clerk of Prince George’s County Circuit Court in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. She is part of a growing left-wing movement gaining traction with voters that calls for radical changes to the U.S. legal system.
The effort is to engineer “Twelve Angry Men” scenarios on real juries — but unlike in the movie, the jurors are actually being trained to ignore evidence and deliberations in favor of political outcomes.
In her election campaign for her current job, Johnson had to overcome questions about her own criminal record. But many voters are willing to give others a second chance when they show evidence of rehabilitation and contrition. The more immediate concern might be embracing a practice that is expressly barred by courts.
One such document allegedly declares, “You have this superpower, and that superpower is you are able to nullify that goddamn jury.”
Far-left professors have long advocated that juries use jury nullification. Georgetown Law professor and MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler has long advocated that Black jurors engage in nullification in cases involving Black defendants. Butler wrote in the Washington Post in 2016: “Confronting the racial crisis in criminal justice, jury nullification gives jurors a special power to send the message that Black lives matter.”
The problem of biased jurors has long plagued the legal system. It can work both ways in ignoring the law to refuse or secure convictions. Past cases involving President Trump and other Republicans have raised bias concerns over the jury pool in cities such as Washington, D.C., and New York City.
But jury nullification is different; it is a direct assault on the very foundation of the American court system. The juror is the thumping heart of that system — a group of empowered citizens who swear to consider cases without prejudice or prejudgment.
It is not a crime to advocate jury nullification. Moreover, there are legitimate concerns raised by investigations into such groups. about chilling the rights of free speech and association. In my view, such advocacy is protected speech under the First Amendment.
But that is not always the case for lawyers, who can face professional consequences. Many courts bar lawyers from arguing for jury nullification. Calling for jury nullification can also present sanctionable conduct for lawyers in a given case.
Even if this is protected speech, voices in both parties need to denounce these efforts. It effectively encourages jurors to lie when they take their oath to follow the law and to shed any outside bias or prejudgment. It is an effort to enlist jurors in using cases to achieve political and social goals at the expense of the rule of law.
The professors and pundits supporting these campaigns are actively seeking a hostile takeover of the courts without explaining to these citizens the implications of such dishonesty. Indeed, Comer has detailed how groups like Freedom Trainers are allegedly seeking to enlist potential jurors while, according to the committee, instructing trainees not to “signal the agenda.”
Instead of addressing the impact of politicizing our jurors, these groups are portraying nullification as “a powerful tool for ensuring fairness and justice.”
These efforts are coming at a time of full assault on our judicial system from the left. Leading Democrats are calling for the packing of the Supreme Court, to reverse decisions with which they disagree. Every leading Democratic candidate for the 2028 presidential nomination has now thrown the court to the baying mob.
Former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is only the most recent, declaring, “We should seriously look at expanding the court while the Democrats are in power.”
From the trial jury to the Supreme Court, many on the left now seek to take control of institutions that have long been the rock of this Republic. If successful, justice will become merely an extension of politics.
What is so disconcerting is that there is no longer any pretense of principle. Law professors are demanding that pledges to pack the Court be used as litmus tests for politicians, and senators are calling for an instant liberal majority on the Court to carry out the “will of the people.”
Liberal professors have long demanded revolutionary change to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
The attack on the American jury may be the most insidious of these efforts. Our legal system invests average citizens with the power to do justice. Every community plays a role in upholding the principles of blind justice. As with court-packing, jury nullification is a previously odious practice now being portrayed as a noble cause. It is part of the conditioning of voters to accept foundational changes to our constitutional system, to further a radical agenda harmful to the nation.
The juror’s role was indeed a “superpower,” but not the one these professors and pundits are pushing. It was a power against prejudice and partisanship; it was the power of doing simple justice in a nation committed to the rule of law.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
IIRC, about 2% of all criminal cases in New York are disposed of via a full-dress trial in front of a petit jury. It may be more elsewhere. I suspect cases which have ambiguities or are widely publicized are more likely to be decided by petit juries.
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There are things to be done to improve the system.
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One is to penalize people for ignoring summonses.
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Another is to distribute via mail questionnaires to be filled out and returned signed and notarized. The questionnaires would be examined by the commissioner of jurors, the clerk of the court in question, a designated judge of that court on a weekly rotation, or some combination and summonses would be issued.
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The first questionnaire would be to identify people who should not be on juries as a matter of policy: people who have been a member of the bar, people who have been sworn police officers, sheriff’s deputies, &c; people incarcerated, on probation, or on parole; people under civil commitment orders or guardianships, people who have been adjudicated disabled, people who have had a felony conviction, people who have had a misdemeanor conviction within the previous x years, people under 25, people over the age of 86, people with an attestation from their doctor that they are homebound, &c., and people who are not citizens.
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The second questionnaire would be to identify people who would prefer to exercise an option to refuse service due to their state in life. That would include working physicians and surgeons, working nurses, working treating practitioners like dentists and physical therapists, public safety personnel like firefighters and EMTs &c; people working in businesses with fewer than 20 employees; mothers caring for pre-school children; and caregivers for the homebound.
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From these notarized mail-in questionnaires, you’d issue summonses and have people assemble to answer a third questionnaire under oath. In this questionnaire, a list of persons associated with trials due to start that week would be presented with the prospect asked to state their relationship with each. These would include defendants, identified victims, prospective witnesses, and the counsel for each side. These would be examined to determine which prospects were unsuitable for a given trial.
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You’d establish a pool of the suitable for each trial and pick 16 names out of the box for each criminal trial and eight names out of the box for each civil trial. You wouldn’t have any voir dire.
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Another thing which might be done would be to limit triers of fact – judges or juries – to binary decisions. Guilty or not guilty on a particular count, guilty or not guilty on a lesser included offense (which would generally be an option unless there were no lesser included offenses), liable or not liable. The trier of fact should not be asked to make determinations on scalar quantities.
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In criminal cases, you should have a series of post conviction sentencing hearings (whether the conviction was via a naked plea, negotiated plea, or trial) in front of a judge and two assessors. The assessors would be drawn at random from guild rolls of professions other than law and there might have to be several hearings with different sets of assessors for each count as apposite. The job of these panels would be to make determination on scalar quantities which are arguments in sentencing formulae in criminal cases and to determine compensatory and punitive damages in civil cases. Physical and occupational therapy (assault cases), pharmacy (in drug cases), and accounting (in embezzlement and fraud cases) would be common recruits for assessor panels, with junior grade practitioners often acceptable.
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Another thing you could do is dispense with grand juries and have prosecutors present a case to a superior or municipal court judge in a preliminary hearing (some of which would include adversary proceedings). The whole body of superior and municipal judges in a given jurisdiction might be tapped for such duty on rotation in the first instance and then recalled to a case later if a prosecutor seeks to amend a bill. If an information was obtained from a judge the case could be randomly assigned to a superior court judge (were the top count a felony) or a municipal court judge (in other instances).
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Another thing you could do would be to have geographic sessions where tickets are returnable and then assemble them into circuits to be worked by a set of municipal court judges. The judge’s home chambers and the clerk of the court would be in a circuit seat and in the seat the day sessions would occur. On evenings and weekends the judges would make the rounds of the local sessions, so localities would have four or five judges appearing at intervals to preside rather than a single JP.
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In addition, you could aggregate superior jurisdictions so there would always be multiple judges available to hear civil cases, criminal cases, and family law cases.
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Another thing you could do would be to have the state administrative board of the courts produce a practice manual on case assignment systems and have unannounced audits by the chief administrator of the courts and by the state auditor which include a franchise to put a clerk’s office under trusteeship. The assignment of a judge to a case should always be by random selection (and it’s a reasonable wager that the system has been gamed in the Trump cases).
If the jurors refuse to follow their oath, the judge should overturn their verdict and arrest them for perjury.
Are you surprised by Jury Nullification? Weren’t you paying attention to Yes We Can, Equity, White Supremacy, and the Disinformation Governance Board?
You’ll note none of these three examples involve “radical left-wingers, or Black people. They also don’t involve Democrats. Some may accurately point out that none of these cases involve attorneys making direct cases to juries, of course, none of Turley’s examples do either.
April 2024 — A public call to acquit Trump in the New York hush-money trial
Example: Explicit advocacy of jury nullification by a Trump supporter
Clay Travis urged listeners who might be called for jury duty in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial to try to get seated on the jury and refuse to convict him. On his radio program, Travis explicitly said, “I want jury nullification,” describing the prosecution as a political sham. He encouraged a prospective juror to vote not guilty even as a form of resistance to what he considered an illegitimate prosecution.
April 2024 –Trump’s selective-prosecution argument and the limits imposed by the trial judge
Example: An argument that could have functioned as a nullification appeal
Before Trump’s New York criminal trial, Trump repeatedly characterized his prosecution as politically motivated. His lawyers, however, expressly told the court that they did not intend to ask the jury to acquit him on the basis of selective prosecution. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan barred the defense from presenting that argument to the jury, explaining that it was not a permissible basis for acquittal under New York law.
The distinction matters: telling jurors that a prosecution is politically motivated and asking them to disregard proof of guilt for that reason can amount to an appeal for nullification. But the reporting does not establish that Trump’s lawyers actually made that prohibited appeal to the jury. It documents the issue being anticipated and the judge preventing it.
July 2022 — Steve Bannon’s attempt to frame his contempt-of-Congress trial as a political dispute
Example: A Trump ally’s proposed jury argument, challenged by federal prosecutors
In the federal prosecution of Steve Bannon, a former Trump adviser charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House committee investigating January 6, Bannon’s defense sought jury-instruction language that federal prosecutors argued amounted to jury nullification. Prosecutors objected that the proposed language would encourage jurors to disregard their duty to apply the law. Bannon was ultimately convicted on both counts.
So, you hate Donald Trump & Co.?
As a now eighty-two year old still rather lucid lay American male I have seen both sides of an inappropriate political aisle violate the rights and privileges of millions of Americans for more than half a century. One area was the military draft to fight elective wars. Another is victimless crimes (e.g., recreational drug laws, prostitution, gambling, etc.), consenting adults not hurting others or even themselves in many cases. Effectively, they are actually just ‘sins of the Church.’ Another is abortion, in the domain of the Church, with God never legally proved to exist.
With a couple of comments referring to Lindsay Clancy and her killing her own children, I’ve personally been writing for more than a decade about the brain damaging, mind altering effects of at least one FDA approved food poison; added artificially cultured “free” (can cross the blood-brain barrier) monosodium glutamate (MSG) in 1980, with the FDA already aware then it would be harmful to some of us (FASEB reports on MSG to the FDA) but, apparently (if not deliberately) not “how, how many or how soon?” I became mysteriously, seriously ill in early 1981 and, statistically, the US obesity and Alzheimer’s Disease epidemics presented by 1990 with the US diabetes epidemic presenting by 1994 (CDC data). I estimate that at least thirty million Americans (minimally; going gone global with the so-called “Western Diet”) have died prematurely just since 1980, including most of my immediate and extended families; too soon for me to fully comprehend what US government and mainstream medicine still fail to recognize.
With all it takes for a “not guilty” verdict being a “reasonable doubt,” I’m again asking herewith (as in other commentaries involving legal professionals), ‘how can any young (relative to me) American adult be held fully legally responsible for any of their bad acts after two and a half generations (not years; not decades) of ignorantly and innocently ingesting FDA approved brain damaging, mind altering food poisoning, many of them preceded by their parents, even in public school meals?’ Another way to look at it is: when the law makers become the law breakers then there is no law; about where we are today. Anecdotally, undesirable FDA approved diet related insomnia is why I’m up so early again. CGS
Once again the less than bright liberals can’t see that this tactic can turn against them the way Harry Reid’s decision to get rid of the judicial filibuster rebounded against Democrats. What’s to stop conservatives to nullify cases against gun owners or for abortion foes to nullify decisions against people attacking clinics? How about attacks on Muslims? Does anyone really want to turn that into a political cause rather than the hate crime it is? Maybe attacks on gays or trans people will be turned into a far right cause?
The Democrats are so greedy for power that the beast that needs feeding is never sated and the bonfire of the vanities leads them further and further down the path to the nation’s destruction.
Now the little punk living in his mother’s basement will retort with his usual nonsensical gibberish as he shows us the sad future we have coming.
My, my, my look at all the rage. Drunk again?
Whew! Calm down man. Focus.
“. . . nullify that goddamn jury.”
So ignore the evidence and the law. Use your politics to find a defendant not guilty.
The flip side of that coin: “. . . to find a defendant guilty.”
Only applicable to Black defendants. Whites don’t count.
You can’t have a communist dictatorship without a sycophant judiciary.
You can have a capitalist society with a “sycophant judiciary” too, aka USA.
My opinion: there is no such thing as “justice” as we all think we know it in the USA. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry. It is a corrupt as any other industry. Money buys “justice”. Everywhere!
An opportune post this morning. Consider the child murderer Clancy of recent, those Mass. nutjobs on the jury tried to circumvent the process too.
Yes, the black male juror with a history of beating up women and children decided to ignore the judge’s instructions on criminal responsibility. Who could have seen that coming?
Ah yes, of course, gotta blame someone, let it be the Black man.
Andrea huh, more likely just plain ole Andy.
If you had actually read the opinion piece you are commenting on you would have read this: “Georgetown Law professor and MSNBC legal analyst Paul Butler has long advocated that Black jurors engage in nullification in cases involving Black defendants.” He’s black, of course. So, yes, this is a policy advocated by blacks to benefit blacks at the expense of non-blacks.
And what does that have to do with the Clancy case? So the sole Black man nullified the outcome. But that’s not what he said publicly.
The Black Westchester: “I want to make something clear from the beginning. I am not saying this juror was right because he was Black, and I am certainly not saying the other eleven jurors were wrong because they were white. Black people do not possess one collective mind, and skin color does not automatically make someone’s interpretation of evidence correct. What concerns me is what happened after this man exercised one of the fundamental responsibilities we ask of every American juror: he reached his own conclusion.”
Please tell me you’re a MA_hole.
“this is a policy advocated by blacks to benefit blacks at the expense of non-blacks.” Policy you say ? But he wasn’t a Black defendant Andy.
I knew you’d say that since you don’t have critical thinking skills. A “policy” is a position advocated to apply to a broad spectrum of cases. Which is what this opinion piece is about. The opinion makes no mention of the Clancy case.
Ignore? Got proof? Were you in the jury room? Or just read it in they the racist Boston Globe and hear it on the racist NPR?
You lie!
Depending on where one lives, jury nullification becomes merely a license to steal, rape and even murder. Ask yourself this: is that something the Founders contemplated and how many other things exist in the Republic which the Founders did not intend? Finally, ask this: how long can this continue before Ben Franklin’s warning becomes reality?
Didn’t think you were on to something, checked. Nullification did exist as early as 1735.
“Jury nullification was a practice in colonial America. Juries often refused to convict defendants under laws they considered unjust or oppressive. Notable Examples. Fugitive Slave Laws: Northern juries sometimes refused to convict individuals accused of helping escaped slaves, reflecting their opposition to these laws. John Peter Zenger Trial (1735): Zenger was acquitted despite clear evidence against him because the jury disagreed with the law he was accused of violating. This case is one of the most famous instances of jury nullification. Navigation Acts: Colonial juries nullified these acts, which restricted trade, by refusing to convict merchants who violated them.” Source: Wikipedia.
Just because they did it then, doesn’t make it right now. For that matter, it wasn’t right then. C’mon…enough of the lunacy!
Then 1735? Now 2026? wasn’t right then? Whew! Words fail me.
I guess in your mind the world hasn’t changed an iota since then?
Leftwing Fascists are unabashedly advocating “jury nullification” to overturn a very successful judicial system. In fact, there is no more fair judicial system than the one that exists in the United States. Leftwing jury nullification is as disgusting as advocating for an all-white jury to convict any black defendant regardless of the evidence. It is exactly the same. The only difference is that nobody is advocating for the latter, but the left is openly calling for the former.
Slow down there ole timer. How many recent (last 10 years) nullifications are you aware of? Its not happening every day. Even Turley couldn’t point to one example, just that a trend seems to exist that calls for nullification. Nothing more. Sit back and relax this morning.
This: “no more fair judicial system than the one that exists in the United States.” Gotta call you out on that. Prove it. I checked, at the top is a list (World Justice Project), is Sweden, New Zealand, then Norway. The USA ranks 11th. Canada and UK rank higher. Who woulda thunk huh?
Hey Genius, didn’t someone just mention the Clancy Jury about 5 minutes ago?
Now go take you ageist juvenile half wit somewhere else.
Huh? You drunk again this morning Robert Howard of Hull, MA?
And what does that have to do with that 7:39 comment? hullbobby, take the day off. Go feed the seagulls .
The DNC efforts of the last 20 years to undermine the Judicial Branch and hence the Constitutional republic is bearing fruit now. We have gone from the OJ jury nullification case, the last entire DC Bench blocking prosecutions and even investigations of DNC darlings in anything that occurred during the Biden Administration, to the attack on a lone juror that held their ground in a Murder case of 3 children. It all has led to “The Judicial Branch is the problem” cry from many!!!!!!
You are preaching in a windstorm Professor. Today’s Democrats are yesterday’s lynch mob, carrying our Constitution to the nearest tree. Stronger measures are required to stop them.
Not a very wise remark…. stronger, to stop them? And what might that be?
It is unbelievable that this “instruction” isn’t illegal. A juror is sworn in to not lie and to make a fair decision. These jurors should be imprisoned as soon as they render a verdict.
“Imprisoned as soon as they render a verdict.” You sure? Nullification: “it encourages potential jurors to disregard the evidence and the law in rendering a form of social justice.” (Turley), so no verdict is “rendered”.