Jae Lee came to the United States legally as a child but never became a citizen. In 2009, he pled guilty to a drug crime after his lawyer assured him that he could not be deported as a result. The lawyer was wrong, because the conviction made Lee subject to mandatory removal. When Lee learned […]
The ballooning prison population in the U.S. implies that there’s a certain ease of obtaining an indictment from grand juries. Here are some modest proposals to reform grand juries to make obtaining indictments more difficult.
Just as the police and the District Attorney use discretion in determining to arrest or seek an indictment against someone, jurors too can use discretion in determining whether to hand down an indictment.
This quote is taken from Lysander Spooner’s, “An Essay on the Trial by Jury,” published in 1852. Jury nullification, according to Spooner, was a final bulwark against encroachments from the state on individual liberty. Spooner argued in this essay that the role of the jury is not only to rule on the facts of the […]