this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
169 points (97.7% liked)

UK Politics

3070 readers
55 users here now

General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both [email protected] and [email protected] .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.

Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.

Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.

If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)

Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.

Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.

[email protected] appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I'm neither a UK person nor a Palestinian activist, but I found this to be an interesting example of how freedom of speech and jury nullification (or "jury equity," apparently) work in the UK.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I didn't realize they had an equivalent in the uk

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Jury nullification isn't a real thing. It's not a law in any country, it's a "loophole" that springs out from some simple concepts.

  1. You have a right to a trial by a jury of your peers, jurors are protected from consequences related to their deliberation and decisions.
  2. If found "not guilty" the state cannot retry you for the same crime.

Both of those things are important to avoid tyranny in the judicial system.

What that means is that if, for any reason, the jury decides to find you "not guilty" even against their "jury instructions" or the law itself, you're off the hook forever. This concept is called "jury nullification" but it's not a law or "feature" of the justice system. In fact most of the time it's been used for very unjust outcomes, for example juries often refused to find people who perpetrated lynchings guilty because a "jury of your peers" in many states was racist AF!

That being said I LOVE to see it used to refuse unjust laws!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Thanks, that makes sense. The internet creates a skewed perspective on shit like this.