were acquitted by American juries despite overwhelming evidence that they were guilty of the crimes they were accused of committing. For example, jury nullification was widely credited with the August 1735 acquittal of John Peter Zenger, who had been tried for seditious libel after publishing articles sharply critical of the Royal Governor of New York, the honorable William Cosby. During the blot on this countryÆs soul known as the era of slavery, Black slaves who fled their confinement in the South to the North were legally supposed to be prosecuted for having violated the Fughtive Slave Law; many times these slaves were freed by Northern juries composed of abolitionists who found the idea of slavery to be unconscienable despite its legal status. During prohibition, rum-runners and moonshiners were often set free by juries who did not believe that alcohol should be illegal. More recently, during the civil rights era many Southern juries comprised of racist whites refused to punish white defendants who had committed crimes against blacksùespecially when those crimes were in committed in retalitation against black men accused of commiting sexual crimes, or even just sexual innuendo, against white women (Hannaford-Agor, 8). Indeed, most legal historians believe that jury nullification was morally justified and appropriate in many of these cases, but particularly in the cases of the Revolutionary War patriots and the fugitive slaves (Butler). We will return to this point later in the paper; now we will turn our eyes to the legal ramifications of jury nullification.
Legal Ramifications of Constitutional Protections
As we have seen, jury nullification as a legal phenomenon has been a not uncommon phenomenon in American jurisprudence since the Colonial era. A casual observer may wonder how this is possible, given our societyÆs focus on the rule of law. The answer, quite simply, is that the juryÆs power to nullify is prote...