The Juror's Power: The Cases
Verdicts of conscience, both edges.
Nine verdicts that explain the power better than any treatise. Six of them freed people the law would have punished for acts the country later honored or forgave. Three of them freed murderers. All nine rest on the same foundation, which is the point.
The Crown v. Penn and Mead
The charge: unlawful assembly, for preaching a Quaker meeting in the street after the authorities had locked the meeting house.
The verdict: not guilty, after the jury had been starved for two nights and returned the same answer three times.
Why it matters: the jurors were fined and jailed, one sued, and the resulting ruling in Bushel's Case is the reason no juror can be punished for a verdict today.
The Crown v. John Peter Zenger
The charge: seditious libel, for printing criticism of the royal governor. Truth was no defense, and the jury's only lawful question was whether Zenger had printed the words.
The verdict: not guilty, in minutes, after Andrew Hamilton asked the jurors to judge the law for themselves.
Why it matters: the law did not change for decades, but prosecutors stopped trying to use it, and American press freedom traces its origin to a jury that refused.
United States v. the rescuers
The charge: violating the Fugitive Slave Act, for carrying Shadrach Minkins out of a Boston courtroom and William “Jerry” Henry out of federal custody in Syracuse.
The verdicts: the Boston prosecutions failed before juries that would not convict; of the many indicted in Syracuse, the government secured one conviction.
Why it matters: a federal law, enforceable in theory everywhere, became unenforceable in practice wherever juries rejected it. Congress was told as much on the floor.
The Prohibition juries
The charge: manufacturing, selling, or transporting liquor under the Volstead Act.
The verdicts: acquittals common enough in many cities that prosecutors abandoned marginal cases and defendants demanded juries on purpose.
Why it matters: the last time the power operated at national scale. Kalven and Zeisel treated it as the proof that juries quietly decline to enforce a law the community has rejected.
United States v. the Camden 28
The charge: breaking into a draft board and destroying Selective Service records in protest of the Vietnam War.
The verdict: not guilty for all twenty-eight defendants on every count, after a trial in which the jury heard how an FBI informant had supplied the tools and the plan.
Why it matters: the jury was allowed to see the government's conduct as well as the defendants', and acquitted. It is the case most often cited when people argue that juries given the whole picture decide well.
The People v. Jack Kevorkian
The charge: assisting suicide, in a series of prosecutions for helping terminally ill patients end their lives.
The verdicts: acquitted by three separate juries, with a fourth trial ending in a mistrial, before a 1999 conviction for second-degree murder in a case in which he had administered the injection himself, filmed it, and insisted on acting as his own lawyer.
Why it matters: for five years, Michigan juries declined to punish conduct the statute plainly covered, and the state legislature rewrote the law around them. The final conviction shows the limit: a jury will forgive a doctor at a bedside long before it forgives a man daring it on television.
State v. Doug Darrell
The charge: cultivating marijuana, fifteen plants in the backyard of a Rastafarian who said he grew them for religious and medicinal use, spotted by a National Guard helicopter.
The verdict: not guilty, after the judge read the jury New Hampshire's instruction on its power to acquit where a conviction would be unjust. The jurors deliberated six hours and asked to hear the instruction twice more.
Why it matters: the first acquittal under the only modern statute to put the instruction in writing, and a rare documented case of a jury told the truth about its power and using it with care.
State v. Milam and Bryant
The charge: the murder of Emmett Till, fourteen years old, kidnapped, tortured, shot, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
The verdict: not guilty, from an all-white jury that deliberated sixty-seven minutes. One juror later said they had taken a break to make it look longer. Both defendants confessed to Look magazine the following year for four thousand dollars, protected by the same double jeopardy rule that makes every acquittal final.
Why it matters: the most famous nullification verdict in American history was an act of racial terror. Any defense of the power that does not begin here is not a serious defense.
State v. Byron De La Beckwith
The charge: the murder of Medgar Evers, the NAACP's Mississippi field secretary, shot in the back in his own driveway in 1963.
The verdicts: two all-white juries deadlocked in 1964 and the state gave up. A third jury, drawn from a different Mississippi, convicted him in 1994. He died in prison.
Why it matters: the hung juries show the power's quieter form. No acquittal was needed; two jurors who would not convict were enough to let a murderer walk free for thirty years. The same arithmetic protects a dissenting juror of conscience today, which is exactly the problem and exactly the point.
The lesson of the ninth case
Every verdict on this page was delivered by people who believed they were doing the right thing, and no court could review any of them. The jurors who freed Penn and the jurors who freed Till's killers both answered to nothing but their own conscience. That is not an argument against the power; the alternative, a jury that can be punished for its verdict, is the system Vaughan dismantled in 1670 for good reason. It is an argument about what kind of people sit in the box. The only reliable improvement to jury verdicts in three and a half centuries has been improving the jurors: drawing them from the whole community, as Ramos and the civil rights cases eventually forced, and asking them to read before they decide.
The power is only as good as the juror who holds it.
Every argument on these pages ends in the same place: a verdict with no reasons attached is only as wise as the conscience behind it. TrueJury exists to exercise that conscience. Real people read the record of a famous case, cast a verdict, write their reasoning, and see where they stood against everyone else. Practice the job before a courtroom asks it of you.
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Sources for this page: the Old Bailey record of the Penn and Mead trial (1670); the Zenger trial record (1735); Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins (1997); Kalven and Zeisel, The American Jury (1966); the Camden 28 trial record (D.N.J. 1973); People v. Kevorkian, 248 Mich. App. 373 (2001); State v. Darrell (Belknap County Superior Court, N.H., Sept. 2012); the Till trial transcript (Tallahatchie County, 1955) and William Bradford Huie, Look, Jan. 24, 1956; Beckwith v. State, 707 So. 2d 547 (Miss. 1997).