Judge Weinstein Supports Informed Juries

This post and a mess of others on Volokh discuss the new trial granted in US v. Polizzi due to the fact that the jury was not informed of the penalties of the crime. Good.

As we have argued in the past, ignorance is not a basis for law. If a conviction can only be made by keeping juries in the dark then the law is probably not a good one.

(“[M]any disagreements [between judges and juries] are explained by the fact that compared to judges, juries appear to require a stronger case by the prosecution to convict the defendant; or by the fact that juries infuse community notions of justice into their verdicts.” (citing, inter alia, Kalven and Zeisel, supra)). Above all, the experience of trial judges is that the jury is among our most conservative institutions. When in doubt we should trust its judgment, as did those who adopted the Sixth Amendment.