OH YEAH THEYRE TALKING ABOUT IT NOW
Please do not remove mods, really sorry for the Google AMP link, but this is a “subscribers only” blocked article on CNN that for some reason AMP just straight up bypasses and opens fine.
Direct link: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/10/us/jury-nullification-luigi-mangione-defense/index.html.
Edit 1: updated title, CNN changed it on me
By that logic, why bother with democracy and not trial by combat?
The problem with your logic is that you assume jurors don’t have a sense of ethics and justice. If they truly don’t, then forget the judiciary as a problem, because the society itself isn’t going to hold up. So in that way, applying your logic here and under that assumption you are right, why bother with democracy and not trial by combat when people no longer care about acting in good will?
I’m not assuming that at all. Jurors have a very specific role, which is to determine whether the evidence against a defendant is sufficient to find them guilty of the charges against them. That does not require a sense of ethics and justice.
Technically, you’re correct. In this particular case though, I don’t think it’s the best kind of correct.
Juries are the triers of fact when present. In a civil case, that means the judge can ask all kinds of nuanced questions in the jury instructions, as that could be necessary for the judge’s application of the law later down the line.
In the US criminal justice system, the laws are meant to be interpretable by the common person (a lot of work being done by “meant-to-be”). A judge only asks them a single question: For the charge X, how do you find? Since juries do not need to justify their decision, they can use whatever reasoning they want to behind closed doors to reach their decision: facts, ethics, or flipping a coin. The lawyers use voir-dire to try to exclude jurors that would be too biased, or would be willing to use a coin flip (juries almost universally take their job seriously—they hold the freedom of someone in their hands.)
As mentioned elsewhere, an acquittal by a jury in the US is non-reviewable. It doesn’t matter why they acquit. Convictions, OTOH, are reviewable, and judges have famously thrown out guilty verdicts from juries before.