June 3, 1997
Email: letters@nytimes.com
Drug Laws Help Foster Juror Rebellions
To the Editor:
In your May 27 editorial "When Jurors
Ignore the Law," you say that the recent Federal Appeals Court ruling
that grants authority to judges to remove jurors who practice nullification
"leaves
unaddressed the problem many Americans think of loosely as jury nullification
but which is really something deeper, and more subtle.
That is the big gulf in how jurors of different racial backgrounds and life experiences tend to perceive the law. . . ."
This is true, but it is not merely a matter of institutionalized racism, or a perceptual divide between white and nonwhite Americans.
The deeper problem is the disrespect for the legal system in general, among both whites and black, that is fostered by the criminal prohibition of drugs.
As happened during alcohol Prohibition, more and more jurors are suffering moral qualms about enforcing Draconian antidrug laws and are refusing to convict.
The case the Appeals Court ruled on grew out of such a drug case.
Paul Butler's article in the Yale Law Review argued that there should be a presumption in favor of nullification in nonviolent drug cases.
In Colorado recently, a juror was convicted of contempt of court as a result of her refusing to vote to convict in a methamphetamine case.
If jury nullification threatens the rule of law, it is because the so-called war on drugs has created judicial injustice too severe for citizens to accept.
The rising tide of jury nullification speaks to the extreme of our drug laws, and the corrosive effect they are having on our system of justice.
AARON D. WILSON
Associate Director, Partnership for Responsible Drug Information, New York
(May 27, 1997)
Essence of Democracy
To the Editor:
With regard to your May 27 editorial "When Jurors Ignore the Law," there is nothing jurors do in invoking nullification that district attorneys do not do in deciding not to prosecute certain cases.
The fact that district attorneys are allowed to do so while jurors are not is the merest bureaucratic quibble.
To require that jurors ignore their sense of morality is to put them in the position of being unable to distinguish right from wrong; that is, to make them "insane" and so "incompetent." Certainly, jury nullification can result -- and has resulted -- in enormities; but the essence of democracy is that on the whole, ordinary people can be relied on to make wise decisions.
JOHN K. LUNDE, Orono, Me. (May 27, 1997)
Nonpolitical Feedback
To the Editor:
The concept of jury nullification referred
to in your editorial of May 27 is enshrined in Indiana's State Constitution,
and order has not broken down. The Indiana Supreme Court has held, in cases
from
1878 to the present, that jurors "are oath-bound to find the facts
honestly and accept the law faithfully as both exist, and . . . return
a verdict which you find just and proper. . . ."
It is in "good conscience" that jurors pass upon the circumstances of a defendant.
Being the last pronouncement of the community standard, legislation is sometimes out of step or behind the times, since the community standard is forever evolving.
Fully informed jurors, by their verdicts, send legislators non-political democratic feedback about the laws they have enacted, which is essential for the proper functioning of our Republic.
R. J. TAVEL, Indianapolis (May 29, 1997) {The writer is a lawyer}
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