Jurors Can Decide Guilt or Innocence Regardless of the Evidence
Defending Juries Who Acquit the Most Hated Accused Murderers in America
I teach a CLE (continuing legal education course) for criminal attorneys and prosecutors here in Florida. We analyze the OJ and Casey Anthony criminal trials both of which became known as “trials of the century.” They resulted in acquittals despite broad public opinion that these two accused murderers got away with heinous crimes. As part of the course program, I suggest that upon closer examination, their acquittals represent a great success for American criminal justice — for unusual reasons.
Our King George III (Image)
Our class considers whether a jury has the authority to acquit an accused despite apparently certain evidence of guilt introduced during their trial. This question raises an issue rooted in the Constitutional relationship of citizens with their government. That relationship’s roots go deep into the American Declaration of Independence which separated us as a people from a monarchy. Our monarch was the possessor of American rights at that time. Our independence reclaimed those for ourselves as individuals and now citizens of the United States of America.
During the revolution, 1/3 of America remained loyalists to King George III, another 1/3 were Patriots, and the rest were watching to see which side won. The paranoia about whether to curtsy to a King or take up arms and drive him away remains part of our American DNA to this day. My CLE class observes and analyzes this bifurcated American DNA of rights in a contemporary review of the jury acquittals of OJ Simpson and Casey Anthony.
Do jurors have a constitutionally protected power to limit the reach of the government’s denial of a citizen’s freedom through our justice system? If the answer is no, does that mean our government has unlimited authority to be both judge and jury and to deny individual liberty through a judicial system that can revoke (citizen) peer approval? Do we even need a jury of peer involvement? If so, why is it in the Constitution? In our CLE evaluation, this issue is resolved by debating how deep the paranoic American DNA from our founding reaches into contemporary America. Some of us today would give to government the authority to convict Casey Anthony or OJ Simpson regardless of their jury-peers preference. Some of us wouldn’t.
The CLE class of licensed attorneys considers whether judges may overrule a jury’s determination of guilt or innocence based on the jury’s reasons or lack of reasons for reaching their determinations. It seems clear, a jury has Constitutional immunity from judicial oversight for important reasons. We study the case law that gives juries the right to disregard a judge’s instructions to apply the law to the facts in evidence during deliberations. A jury’s exemption from judicial oversight attracts attention when their decision is an acquittal in a high-profile media-absorbed trial. I suggest that a judge’s instructions are a government directive to an accused’s peers to apply the government’s laws to the facts in evidence. That agency directive and the foundation for it comes from the interests of the government as supreme over any individual citizen. But does that government supremacy extend to citizens when they are sitting as a jury? Do citizens sitting as a jury acquire exemption from their government’s laws? Suppose jurors ignore the laws by refusing to apply them in an accused’s trial. Is there nothing a judge can do?
Our class considers whether this right of juries to acquit virtually anybody and for any reason is a confirmation that the American DNA resolves its paranoia over submission to government authority in favor of preserving the power of citizens to judge an accused without reservation or reversal by the government.
I ask the class if this resolution of America’s conflicted relationship toward government authority was played out in the Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson trials. There was popular opinion led by loud voices demanding that the accused should be found guilty. When an accused’s case is handed to the jury, the authority for assigning government involvement in the accused’s life transfers from the authority of government (the judge) to the authority of the people. Why else would there be a Sixth Amendment peer-jury right? That is no small distinction. It is what the Declaration of Independence promised.
At the end of the class, I accept an obligation to explain the positive outcomes I discern from the OJ and CA acquittals. OJ’s acquittal led to the wholesale reform of the LAPD and its justice system through the immediate imposition of consent decrees by the US Justice Dept. The DOJ found LA law enforcement investigating OJ and presenting evidence against him was racist and functioned for years as a paramilitary organization.
In the Casey case, I, myself, have published a book that confirms the jury’s prescience in acquitting her since new evidence surfaced identifying the killer as a male member of her family. Although Casey lied to the police and covered up her child’s death, evidence suggests she did not kill her daughter, Caylee. It seems there is justice in reserving to the people, the ultimate authority to substitute its judgment for that of its government. Justice can be the final arbiter for how the conflicted American DNA is resolved in the halls of criminal justice.
The jury has an inherent constitutional power that protects themselves and accused citizens from what would become an unlimited authority of their government (including legislatures who pass laws and punishments) to remove their sixth amendment rights to be judged by peers. The jury process is a check against government usurpation of every citizen’s natural rights. The American government’s natural rights authority resides permanently with the people. The Declaration’s third self-evident truth asserts that Governments are instituted to secure citizens’ natural rights against usurpation by the government. That is to say, the authority to remove personal freedom resides with the peers of every accused citizen. A judge cannot also be a jury in an American trial. That is what monarchs used to do and that is what despots still do.
I remind my prosecutors in the audience that an accused enters the
courtroom in a criminal trial setting with the presumption of innocence. That presumption does not come from the government. It is declared to be a Constitutional right for American citizens. The Declaration would define it as a natural right. Absent a finding of guilt by her peers, an acquittal by peers returns that presumption to the acquitted person as she leaves the courtroom. Government is an administrator and observer of citizens deciding another citizen’s punishment or freedom.
These constitutional protections flow from a uniquely American principle that governments exist to protect the rights of those it governs. Those rights cannot be protected if the long arm of government extends into the jury room during deliberations of any criminal case.
A criminal jury is the final line of defense against the usurpation of citizens’ rights by their government. Can a judge compel a jury to interpret facts in a criminal case so that they fit a law as defined by a judge? A judge is part of the system of government that brings charges against peer citizens. That judge and her act is a thief of the idea of a government of, by, and for the people if she interferes with whatever decision a jury decides.
I put it simply in my CLE course. A judge has the legal authority to instruct a jury to apply the law to the facts in a case, but a jury has the power to disregard the government’s instructions by withholding its consent that an accused will be punished for disobeying those laws. Without the protection of this juridical impunity, then the idea of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness become redefined as a gift from the government, something the Declaration and the Constitution expressly reject.
