Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

July 9, 2012

When New Hampshire Governor John Lynch signed HB 146 into law on June 18, the Granite State became the first in the nation to enact a measure explicitly recognizing and protecting the indispensable right of jury nullification.

There is nothing novel about the principle and practice of jury nullification. At the time of the American founding it was well and widely understood that the chief function of citizen juries was to force the government to prove its case against a defendant ? and the validity of the law in question.

In contemporary America, however, trial by jury has been all but abolished in practice. Reviewing recent Supreme Court rulings, legal commentator Adam Liptak of the New York Times observes that in its just-completed term, the High Court ?has turned its attention away from criminal trials, which are vanishingly rare, and toward the real world of criminal justice, in which plea bargains are the norm and harsh sentences commonplace.?

The fact that the right to a trial by a jury of one?s peers, which is supposedly sacrosanct, has become all but extinct illustrates the extent to which the U.S. ?justice? system has become Sovietized. The overdue counter-revolution has begun in New Hampshire.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.