The creators of HBO's The Wire write in a Time op-ed that they would refuse to convict non-violent drug offender. Why? "What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain."
Good for them.
Jury nullification is a central idea in libertarian political philosophy. It rests on the principle that the State does not determine what is right and wrong, but rather there is a higher, natural, laws that all men must follow--regardless of their title. This fundamental law is that no man can initiate violence against another. So then what is the status of drug users? Though their practice may be an abhorrent vice, it is not a crime. Any attempt to punish him violates the drug user's natural right to do with his body as he chooses, provided he does no harm to others.
Not only must jurors apply the law, but they must also judge the law. If a law is unjust, then it is a person's moral duty not to convict. It is good to see this central insight of Lysander Spooner in his Trial by Jury appear in a mainstream magazine:
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
