Racial Jury Nullification Re-visited: Should Black Jurors Let Off Black Defendants?
This is an oldie, but a goodie. Professor Paul Butler writes on the theory of Jury Nullification, where African Americans should not convict African American defendants.
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Jury nullification has been with us since the beginning of the country. White jurors have been at it all the time, most recently the Rodney King beating but even more so the Emmitt Till murder.
We can see how much progress we have made in the civil rights movement when black people start copying the behavior of the Ku Klux Klan that used jury nullification to not convict white criminals. Of course this is not the first such situation. The Democratic Party, the old slave owners’ party, still advocates one of the most important Klan policies – gun control. In the Deep South during Jim Crow there were often more blacks than whites in many counties. How do you think the Klan controlled those black people? The whites had all guns and the Klan took the guns away from the blacks. After the Civil War black Union soldiers were allowed to take their guns home when discharged, but they didn’t get to keep them long. The night-rider Klansmen took them all. Real progress!!! Yes, real progress with civil rights!!! Joseph L. Bass, Ed.D. http://www.abettersociety.info