Jury nullification is a concept as old as the United States itself, yet most Americans haven’t a clue as to what it is all about.

Say, for example, that you don’t believe marijuana should be against the law, or people should not go to jail for housing code violations - as they presently do in America, or take the true case of an 18-year old boy who because of series of Federal sentencing mandates got a life sentence for selling $300 of crack cocaine in a non-violent offense to a consenting adult.

Now you find yourself sitting on a jury in which the defendant stands accused of marijuana possession, or code violations for not putting a new roof on his house or the boy whose future is to be ruined by draconian drug law sentences?

What would you do?

The judge, the prosecutors and the members of whatever law enforcement agency arrested the defendant would have you believe that, if they can show that he was, in fact, in possession of marijuana, did not fix his roof, or sold $300 of cocaine, you must convict him.

The judge will often even issue instructions of law to a jury stating that this is the case. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Jury nullification is what happens when even one lone juror decides, “Hey, these marijuana laws are crazy, government can’t make a plant, that God or nature made, illegal,” or “you can’t put a man in jail for not fixing his roof that leaks only on him,” or “while selling crack cocaine is wrong, it is a greater injustice to sentence a boy to life imprisonment for a non-violent offense” and the juror votes not to convict, based not on what the law dictates but rather on whether the law makes any sense whatsoever.

The Founding Fathers were very familiar with the concept of jury nullification and even wrote about it.

“I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1771.

The first Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Jay, amplified Jefferson’s remarks in 1794.

“The jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy,” he wrote.

And two centuries later, in 1975, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White spelled it out yet again.

“The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power--to make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor and in preference to the professional or perhaps over conditioned or biased response of a judge.”

Since the Niagara Falls Reporter began publishing a dozen years ago, we’ve seen any number of ridiculous cases come before the municipal, county and state supreme courts. But none of them matches the overzealous, and power-mad prosecution of Town of Lockport businessman Dave Mongielo, who is currently facing 15 days in jail and a hefty fine for the crime of displaying a sign at a business he owns (see story, page 3).

If ever a case was meant for jury nullification, Mongielo’s is it.

Would 12 rational and sane residents of Niagara County – picked at random – unanimously decide to sentence another rational adult to 15 days in jail because of an alleged zoning violation involving a sign?

A sign that was being used to raise money for a Niagara County sheriff’s deputy who lost both legs in an automobile accident, no less?

We hardly think so.

The powers that be in the Town of Lockport, however, chose to deny Mongielo his right to a jury trial. They also denied him a change of venue when he said his political activism in the town was the real reason behind the case, and alleged that Town Justice Raymond Schilling who sentenced him could not be trusted to give him a fair shake.

On May 26, Niagara County Judge Matthew J. Murphy – who is undoubtedly familiar with the concept of jury nullification – granted Mongielo a stay in serving his sentence in order to give him time to appeal.

We can only hope that Murphy grants Mongielo a new trial, a jury trial, so that this obvious miscarriage of justice can be put right.

The 19th Century American political philosopher Lysander Spooner understood well the power of juries, down to the one juror of conscience who might do the right thing.

“For more than six hundred years --- that is, since Magna Carta, in 1215 --- there has been no clearer principle of English or American constitutional law, than that, in criminal cases, it is not only the right and duty of juries to judge what are the facts, what is the law, and what was the moral intent of the accused,” Spooner wrote. “(B)ut that it is also their right, and their primary and paramount duty, to judge of the justice of the law, and to hold all laws invalid, that are, in their opinion, unjust or oppressive, and all persons guiltless in violating, or resisting the execution of, such laws.”