She also said they were "trying" to find him guilty. That right there is wrong. A jury is not supposed to try to find a defendant either guilty or not guilty, they are supposed to try to decide whether or not the evidence supports the charge(s). Nothing more, nothing less.
Actually, where I wrote "nothing more, nothing less" above, I should have included an exception: Jury Nullification.
Especially in this day of zealous over-charging (see earlier comments on this topic), it may in fact be appropriate for a jury to "try" to find a defendant not guilty despite what a law says -- or what a judge
says the law says. Those interested in learning more about this concept should look up FIJA - the Fully Informed Jurors Association. Not all laws are good laws, and some laws may technically apply to a particular defendant and a particular set of circumstances yet morally and practically it would be a miscarriage of justice (albeit not of the law) to convict.
In such cases, the jury has every right to refuse to convict -- regardless of what the law (or the judge) says. And, in fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled to this effect. Sadly, they later (100 years later, in fact) ruled that judges don't have to inform jurors that they have a right (or a duty) to decide whether or not a law is just and fair. In fact, judges routinely tell jurors that they are NOT allowed to interpret the law, that they (the jury) must accept what the judge tells them the law says.
That's a lie.
Way, way back, in the early days of the U.S. a case came before the Supreme Court. The case was
Georgia v. Brailsford, 3 U.S. 1 (1794). In that case, John Jay, the very first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, wrote that
It may not be amiss, here, Gentlemen, to remind you of the good old rule, that on questions of fact, it is the province of the jury, on questions of law, it is the province of the court to decide. But it must be observed that by the same law, which recognizes this reasonable distribution of jurisdiction, you have nevertheless a right to take upon yourselves to judge of both, and to determine the law as well as the fact in controversy. On this, and on every other occasion, however, we have no doubt, you will pay that respect, which is due to the opinion of the court: For, as on the one hand, it is presumed, that juries are the best judges of facts; it is, on the other hand, presumable, that the court are the best judges of the law. But still both objects are lawfully, within your power of decision.
In 1895 in
Sparf v. United States, the Court said that courts need not inform jurors of their
de facto right of juror nullification
although jurors' inherent right to judge the law remains unchallenged.
I have posted before (though perhaps not on this forum) that I was once rejected for jury duty over this very issue. During
voir dire, which was being carried out by groups rather than individually as I had always encountered during previous calls to jury duty, one of the attorneys asked if anyone would have a problem following the judge's instructions on the law. Normally, I would have kept my mouth shut, but ... we were under oath, so I had to raise my hand and acknowledge that if I disagreed with what a judge said, i would indeed have trouble following his or her instructions.
That threw the process into a furor. The other prospective jurors were quickly removed from the room. BOTH attorneys ganged up on me and tried to brow-beat me into acknowledging that jurors must follow the judge's instructions. When I refused to knuckle under, they scoured the courthouse until they found a judge who wasn't in a hearing, and brought me before her. She took up the inquisition right where the attorneys had left off. When I mentioned the old Supreme Court precedent (I didn't recall the case name then), the judge told me I was wrong, and that I should go home and study my history better. She then dismissed me.
So I went home, looked up the case, verified the exact language used by the Chief Justice, and wrote a letter to the judge providing her with the case name and citation, and the exact quotation from John Jay.
She never acknowledged my letter. Judges don't like it when the serfs get uppity.
