Jury Nullification and Theater
This week and next, I want to talk about Jury Nullification and how theater can encourage it.
Basically, Jury Nullification occurs in a criminal trial when a jury acquits a defendant, even though it believes the defendant might be guilty for the following reasons:
- because the law is unjust
- because the punishment is too severe
- because the prosecutor has misapplied the law, or
- because of certain beliefs the jury has about the defendant.
It is the last reason where theater can have an impact.
The Facts
A person is convicted of a crime because of evidence or, in some cases, because of a confession. Sometimes it is because of an eyewitness identification.
Society seems to hold on to a core belief that only guilty people confess. We also seem to believe that, absent a reason to lie and with reasonable distance and lighting conditions, an eyewitness identification is accurate.
Neither of these beliefs are correct. In the case of confessions, over one-fourth are false in general, and in the case of murder with poor or disadvantaged defendants, it can approach eighty-one percent. This lack of reliability is the same or worse when it comes to eyewitness identification. The most frequent contributor to wrongful convictions, at seventy-one percent, is mistaken identification.
Society’s incorrect beliefs result in innocent people going to jail.
This is Where Theater Comes In
Because Hip Hop Theater is at its core social justice theater, it is our obligation to change these beliefs with our art.
How we can do this is the subject of next week’s blog. Stay tuned to see how you can help.