Good or bad? It depends on the political camp you belong to. In general, I think that it's rather good. It will be a good lesson for politicians. Hopefully, they will get the idea that they are not allowed to do whatever they want to. They are not almighty and all their actions have their consequences.
no one will take american democracy serious anymore after trump impeachment, and half of america will stop supporting the democracy.
The American government is not a Democracy. A democracy is majority rule, not majority elections. Americans might have majority elections, but they don't have majority rule.
The American jury can nullify both the facts of a case, and the law surrounding it. When Americans decide they want to stop playing politics, they will bring their points to the local juries, and they will get what the local people want... essentially what the people want.
The report of thecase includes the note: “Agreeably to this decision, it is now settled, that...jurors are in no way questionable for their finding.”
Thereafter, juries used nullification to avoid the extremely harsh penalties of serious offenses that had been proved, by finding the defendants guilty of lesser offenses. Blackstone characterized this practice of juries as “pious perjury.”
Later, colonial juries nullified British law in prosecutions that the colonists considered to be unjust. For example, in 1735 John Peter Zenger was prosecuted for seditious libel for printing a journal that criticized the colonial governor of New York for crimes and other faults. The common law rule at the time was that “the greater the truth, the greater the libel, ”so truth was not a defense to a charge of libel. When Zenger’s first two lawyers were disbarred for zealously representing him, Zenger had to go out of the state for a lawyer and retained Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia (no relation to Alexander Hamilton).
Hamilton in effect admitted that Zenger had committed the facts constituting the offense. But, without using the phrase “jury nullification,” Hamilton argued to the jury that they had the power to decide the law as well as the facts, and that they should disregard the judge’s instructions and recognize truth as a defense. The jury did so, and acquitted Zenger.
Why America's Founders Didn't Want a Democracy When I took history and government in school, many critical issues were misrepresented, given short shrift, or even ignored entirely. And those lacunae undermined my ability to adequately understand many things. Randall Holcombe's new book,
Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History, fills in some very substantial gaps, particularly with regard to American constitutionalism and how it has morphed from protecting liberty to advancing democracy at the expense of liberty. It does so with a host of novel and important insights rather than the disinterest generated by the books I suffered through in school.
