If you want to participate in jury nullification, it’s imperative that you do your research and know how to conduct yourself. It’s not as simple as just making sure you never say “jury nullification” within hearing range of the court room. And doing your due diligence isn’t as simple as reading some surface-level web pages about how jury nullification works.
The first thing you need to know is that this is exceedingly difficult. If you get summoned, don’t get summarily dismissed, get through voir dire and onto the jury – here there are already three distinct stages, and passing each of them is its own small miracle. That’s before you even get to the part where you convince the rest of the jury to go along with it, which you have to do without saying the words. You also have to appear to be earnestly engaged in doing your duty as a juror properly. Obstinance is cause for dismissal and contempt, so just sitting there and saying “not guilty” for no reason and refusing to explain yourself or change your position may not go as well as you might think. You have to actually play the game, go along with the process, and bring up reasonable and compelling questions and concerns about the state’s burden of proof.
Regarding voir dire: Here’s one area where you’ll need to have done in-depth research. If you haven’t even googled things like “detecting deception during voir dire” or “how to identify a stealth juror” – if you haven’t read all the material you can get your hands on that gives advice to attorneys about the nuances of juror vetting and selection – then you haven’t spent enough time knowing your enemy, and you will fail. If you haven’t heard of a “stealth juror” before, you are out of your depth and you will fail. If it hasn’t occurred to you that the attorneys might look you up online (they will) to see if you’ve posted anything that conflicts with what you tell them in court, then you have probably already failed before you even started.
You will basically need to be in deep cover with regard to your knowledge of and inclination toward jury nullification. It’s not even as easy as just pretending you’ve never heard of it. That can end up being too much of a good thing, too hard to believe, depending. In a similar way, they don’t necessarily want to hear that you’re some kind of totally impartial person with no opinions about anything, no biases. Everyone has those; what they want is people who can set them aside to do the job they’ve been given. It’s surely not an easy balance to strike, seeming like you’re someone who will be a good juror, while making sure you also give the appearance of being a realistic and believable person, and avoiding a host of little reasons why they might decide to use one of their peremptory strikes on you (if you don’t know what that is, you haven’t done enough research and will fail).
You’ll also need the same obsessive depth of familiarity with the entire process, voir dire to verdict, that someone would have if they actually were some kind of deep cover clandestine agent sent to infiltrate a jury. You will need to accomplish this without ever talking to anyone about your interest in this subject. You have to be either very dedicated or very lucky.
I can see the Matrix, man, I can see the truth behind it all, I can interpret raw markdown and even write bbCode by hand