750
Food Not Bombs trial rescheduled after too many jurors objected to $500 fine for feeding homeless
(www.houstonchronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
750 points (98.8% liked)
News
23274 readers
3297 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
At a systemic level, its validity is kind of irrelevant because any time you ask a human being to judge whether a law is broken, there's no way to prevent them from saying no because they don't agree with the law. Prosecutors and judges can try to weed out jurors who will answer based on their conscience rather than just facts, but they can't eliminate the possibility.
On a personal level, I can recognize nullification is easy to abuse, but if I'm on a jury and I'm asked to convict someone of breaking an unjust law, I could not in good conscience sacrifice that person's freedom just because another juror in a different trial could do the same thing for bad reasons.
As the question of whether nullification should be promoted, I think it should, because people have a right to know how their government works as part of their right to choose how it works. A government whose most fundamental mechanisms can't hold up to public security is ipso facto authoritarian and undemocratic.