We can find cases of jury nullification that helped achieve justice and that thwarted justice. Here are two cases of the latter.
As I’ve written elsewhere, I found an 1895 case in Aspen, Colorado, involving a man accused of violating the state’s anti-discrimination law. He was pretty obviously guilty, but a jury let him off. However, I have not tracked down additional details about the case. I don’t know, for example, what the criminal penalty was. My general sense is that anti-discrimination laws should at most involve corrective orders and perhaps financial penalties.
In his biography, Frederick Douglass: Self-Made Man, Timothy Sandefur gives another example. Sandefur describes “some sensational conflicts over slavery in Baltimore, sparked by the vanguard abolitionist Benjamin Lundy and his protege, William Lloyd Garrison. Lundy had been publishing his weekly Genius of Universal Emancipation since arriving in the city in 1825. The following Spring, an infamous slave trader named Austin Woolfolk beat Lundy nearly to death on a Baltimore street after he denounced Woolfolk in the Genius as a ‘monster in human shape,’ and an ‘adamantine creature.’ The slave dealer was convicted of attempted murder, but the jury imposed a fine of only $1.”
Tags: jury nullification