It seems to me that it might be possible to extract some of these intuitions without all of them.
For example, say that the “rules as written down” are something along the lines of “we get a group of your peers to determine whether you’ve done something wrong, and if you have what it is. Then we decide based on precedent what your sentence is.”
In that case, members of the jury are capable of deciding that defendants have not done anything wrong, even if there is a specific punishment listed for what the defendant did.
I don’t mean to argue that this is what is the case, for example I don’t believe that the rules I described are a good representation of US criminal law. But that is a fact about the specific system you are involved in; I don’t believe that it is a priori problematic to have “jury nullification” in the sense of jurors acquitting persons who committed “crimes.”
It seems to me that it might be possible to extract some of these intuitions without all of them.
For example, say that the “rules as written down” are something along the lines of “we get a group of your peers to determine whether you’ve done something wrong, and if you have what it is. Then we decide based on precedent what your sentence is.”
In that case, members of the jury are capable of deciding that defendants have not done anything wrong, even if there is a specific punishment listed for what the defendant did.
I don’t mean to argue that this is what is the case, for example I don’t believe that the rules I described are a good representation of US criminal law. But that is a fact about the specific system you are involved in; I don’t believe that it is a priori problematic to have “jury nullification” in the sense of jurors acquitting persons who committed “crimes.”