Today, it's about jury nullification. Via Radley Balko I found this post guest blogged by a Texas prosecutor who claims jury nullification is manifestly illegal. Specifically, he argues that David Simon, Ed Burns, and the other creators of The Wire were committing aggrevated perjury by suggesting others should nullify drug laws when serving on juries. You can read the prosecutor's argument to see if it's valid, but I thought this comment by Mark Draughn, on which he expands at his blog, was completely on point:
I understand that, when acting as a juror, I have a role to perform, and that it's important to do it well and with integrity. But I also believe in my heart that many things that happen as part of the war on drugs are, to keep this simple, evil-evil like witch burnings and slavery and Kristallnacht.
Some of these evil things are done by prosecutors. If they don't want me to nullify, they shouldn't ask me to take part in their foul deeds. I need to be able to sleep at night.
Draughn nails the libertarian position on this matter by exposing how the state requires our consent in order to do things we would never find moral or just as individuals.
The system is not inevitable; you choose on a moment by moment basis whether to give it legitimacy or to disregard it. Judges, prosecutors, jurors - even defendants - are just people, after all, with no more right to dictate your conscience than anybody else. Systems only annihilate human qualities of justice and dignity because we allow them to. We could do away with the disgusting war on drugs and most of the other ills of government if we just refused to stand in line like we're told, because the system depends much more on us than we on it. You don't have to merely serve as a replaceable part in a great machine.
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