Punishment Should Fit Crime

South Dakota voters are currently considering whether to allow individual juries to acquit criminal defendants accused of violating laws deemed “misguided or draconian.” This power, known as jury nullification, would base criminal convictions on juries’ judgment not only on the facts of a case, but on the soundness of the law broken. Under the proposed Amendment A, to be voted on during the November elections in South Dakota, individual defendants could confess their guilt but ask for acquittal by arguing that the laws violated were misguided. Juries would then decide whether the law, as applied in a specific case, was fair and appropriate. A jury could refuse to convict even admitted criminals if it decided that the laws under which they were charged were unfair.

Amendment A sets a dangerous precedent by allowing individual interpretation of what must be a common legal code. Order and stability in our society are guaranteed by the existence of a single standard of conduct that all citizens must obey. Regardless of whether an individual agrees with the justice of a law, that individual is compelled to abide by the law or face criminal penalties. Jury nullification undermines the status of the legal code as applicable to all members of society by introducing an element of caprice into what should be a completely fair, standard judicial process. Arbitrary conviction based not on factual guilt, but on a jury’s collective opinion of a law’s fairness, encourages disobedience to the legal code because the certainty that proven guilt results in criminal penalties is weakened. Deterring crime—a major function of the law—can only be accomplished with the universal recognition that criminal action results in punishment. Interrupting that direct link between crime and punishment weakens the deterrent effect of the legal code, thereby increasing criminal action.

Our legal system empowers juries to make factual decisions only—whether a defendant committed a crime, based on concrete evidence and witnesses’ testimony. Juries must determine if laws have been broken—they are not directed to opine on the fairness of a specific law; nor should they. America’s democratic system places the responsibility for creating law on the shoulders of the American people via popularly elected representatives. The legislature should create the law, while the judicial system interprets it; this is the very basis of the separation of powers. Allowing juries to disregard the will of the people by voiding an individual law in a specific case undermines the democratic nature of the American legal system. If the people perceive the law as arbitrarily determined by a 12-member panel lacking any accountability to the citizenry at large, popular confidence in a uniform legal code will disappear.

Constant modification of the legal code mirrors the changes in American life over time. The rise of the Internet has sparked a huge corpus of new law; the civil rights movement caused existing laws to be overturned and replaced with far different statutes. Inevitably, there are outdated laws on the books reflecting the popular will of a different time. The overcrowded justice system prevents many of these laws from being overturned, as more pressing cases take up the limited time of lawyers and judges alike. In practice, police and prosecutors rarely enforce outdated statutes dealing with small issues. Likewise, some juries will inevitably decide not to convict a defendant they know to be guilty—due to extenuating circumstances, belief that the law broken was unjust or any number of reasons. Relying on individual citizens to judge cases, with all the variation of opinion that implies, means that the legal system will never dispense perfect justice—but that doesn’t mean such deviance should be encouraged or legitimized.

When juries usurp the role of the legislature by deciding the wisdom of a law, there can be terrible consequences—exemplified by the refusal of some Southern juries to convict defendants for lynching blacks in the late nineteenth century. Jury nullification undermines the fairness of the legal system by making the enforcement of what should be a uniform standard of conduct dependent only on the opinion of a 12-member jury—without any accountability to the citizenry at large. South Dakota’s proposed Amendment A circumvents the democratic judicial process, and should be voted down.