Ignoring the facts is anarchy with a law degree, not justice | John Fredericks

The left-leaning legal intelligentsia — the crowd that spent four years weaponizing the Department of Justice against Donald Trump, his associates and anyone who dared support him — has now cooked up a scheme to torch the American justice system from the inside out.

It's called jury nullification. 

Rogue judges’ rulings to upend the president’s policies aren’t enough for the political left. They want jurors to ignore the law if they don't like the politics of the prosecution.

That’s the new war cry echoing through the law reviews, the op-ed pages and the faculty lounges of every law school from Yale to Berkeley. Liberal attorneys want to stop the Trump administration from finally holding criminals accountable.

This isn't about “the evidence doesn’t support a conviction," or “the law is being misapplied.” It's that "we don’t like who’s being prosecuted, so the jury should acquit, regardless of the facts."

This is not justice. This is anarchy with a law degree. 

Let’s be crystal clear about what jury nullification is and what it has done in American history — because the left sure doesn’t want to talk about that part. Jury nullification was the legal mechanism that let white murderers walk free throughout the Jim Crow South. When Emmett Till’s killers — Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam — were acquitted in 1955 by an all-white jury despite overwhelming evidence, that was jury nullification in action. 

The jury knew what they were doing. They didn’t care about the law. They cared about the politics of the moment. The result? Two murderers walked out of that courthouse smiling and later bragged about the killing to a magazine.

And then there’s O.J. Simpson. Remember that trial?

Whatever you think about the evidence — and the evidence was mountainous — the Simpson verdict in 1995 was widely understood as a political statement by a jury that had watched Rodney King and decided this was payback time.

Did Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman get justice? No. They got nullification. Two people are dead. Their families got nothing. Simpson got a golf game.

That is the legacy of jury nullification: Dead victims, freed killers and a mockery of equal justice under law.

Now the political left wants to resurrect this poison pill -- not to protect the powerless, but to protect their political class from accountability. The elites decide on guilt or innocence based on their current political agenda.

They’re terrified because the Trump administration is doing what no one in Washington had the guts to do in decades: prosecuting the people who abused the levers of government power. This includes:

• The corrupt FBI officials who launched a fraudulent investigation into a sitting president.
• The prosecutors who hid exculpatory evidence.
• The bureaucrats who weaponized the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department and the intelligence community against American citizens for political purposes.

These people are now facing scrutiny, and suddenly the left discovers that jury nullification is a grand American tradition.

It’s not a tradition. It’s a cancer.

The rule of law is not a smorgasbord where you pick and choose which verdicts you like based on the politics of the defendant. If we accept that jurors can override the law based on their personal political sympathies, then we no longer have a justice system. We have mob rule with better parking.

The left screamed for four years that “no one is above the law” when they were targeting Trump. Now that the tables have turned and documented misconduct is under investigation, is the law itself suddenly the problem?

No. The law is not the problem. The lawbreakers are the problem. And jury nullification is not a remedy. It is a wrecking ball aimed at the last institution standing between American citizens and political chaos.

Don’t let them sell you this poison. Not now. Not ever.