Jury Nullification In The Legal System

Juries are a fundamental institution within Canadian law and decide a large portion of important cases, changing many lives. Considering that a jury is simply a group of citizens who appeared to be the right fit for jury duty on a list, do we place too much power in their hands? This paper looks at the jury’s power of nullification and why it should or should not continue to be a part of the Canadian justice system and if it should, how can we improve it? Drawing on real cases and scholarly journals this paper will attempt to address some major points on this issue. First of all, what exactly is jury nullification and how is it used in Canadian courts? Also what are the strengths and weaknesses of nullification and how have we seen these in
It is a very rigid side of law that is blind to circumstance and individual cases. Substantive law on the other hand is how the law is actually applied and enforced. Since it cannot be avoided substantive law usually has some discretion of legal actors involved in the process such as police, judges and as discussed this far, juries. Jury nullification perhaps creates the biggest gap between substantive and formal law as it is subverting the rules of formal law in a legal case and so it becomes substantive law. The problem with this is that formal law likes to treat everyone as equals, rule like cases similarly and be as predictable and reliable as possible. With jury nullification law potentially loses many of these aspects in favour of treating cases involving different individuals and circumstances differently with no rule of precedent being set. This paper asserts that substantive law being different from formal law is not a bad thing; rather it makes law less alienating and daunting to an individual. Real justice, as mentioned earlier in the paper is not simply meeting a status quo. Real justice ought to be for the people and community that fund it with their tax dollars and that it was created to serve. Justice is not being done if it is simply used by legal actors to swallow people up into a system that makes it very hard for them to find work and gain trust once they get out. Also although equality is important it does not exist in society regardless so to maintain that justice without nullification is equal is simply false. Leroy Reed’s case was not the same as other cases of a similar nature and should not be treated as such, special circumstances should require the law to acknowledge the differences and treat the case differently. With this leaves quite a large gap in between what law is written down as and how it is practically applied, this could perhaps signal us that