Ever hear of jury nullification? If you are ever called to serve on a jury, you might well want to know more about it. An good article about it can be found here.

Basically, jury nullification is a right given to every citizen of this country by the founding fathers to use their conscience and, if they do not agree with a law, they may also judge the law itself by voting on a verdict according to their conscience, rather than the law as it is written. The jury can acquit a defendant if they disagree with the law under which the defendant is being convicted.

Judges and prosecutors rarely if ever inform a jury of this and instead tell a juror to consider only the facts, yet it is a very important right to all of us. The people are the final gauntlet through which a law must pass, and as jurors they can protest that law.

Read the article above; there are a lot of other places where this information can be found online as well, but this page explains it nicely.

One case of jury nullification came into play when William Penn--yes, the William Penn you remember from your American History class--was brough to trial in 1670 for preaching an illiegal Quaker sermon. The jurors refised to convict, since they couldn't understand why this was a crime in the first place. The jurors themselves were fined and imprisoned until they would give in and produce the conviction the court wanted, but four of them still refused.

Finally the English Court of Common Pleasruled that a jury could refuse to enforce a law if it offended their conscience or if they were't allowed to read it for themselves (they were not allowed, in this case), and that they could not be punished for doing so. This was an important landmark in British law. This same right has been reinforced by some of the top judges in this land in the past, including Oliver Wendell Holmes.

This article goes into some actual cases to do with jury nullification, and is quite interesting in terms of how this right has been applied in some cases, and how other courts have not supported it at all.

I invite you to do your own research on this right, and would enjoy hearing from those who have more knowledge of it than I. I am not an attorney, and would advise you to seek legal counsel on this issue.

I do think you will find that we the people do have some rights after all to dissent with the law, and that rights like these are being systematically being taken from us under the guise of "security". We already are conditioned to put up with a great deal of personal invasion of privacy and searches without warrants (anyone who has ever gone through an airport knows this), but knowing you have some rights with which to fight back may be the most important thing you ever learn. Knowledge is power, but so is the Constitution under which our laws have been written.