Letter Re: Jury Nullification Law in Alaska
There is a quid-pro-quo to this proposal. If juries are allowed to “interpret” the application of a law, they could also decide to escalate the severity as well as diminish. I sat on a quasi-judicial board as chairman for a time, and on rare occasions the board would decide, by majority, on the “spirit” of the law rather than the letter of the law, thus compelling the municipality to appeal the decision to administrative court, wherein the decision was consistently overturned. The point is, sometimes they decided not to enforce the law, and sometimes they decided to impose a more …