On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 11:08:20 -0400, "J. Clarke"
wrote:
|
|I have been told that juries can convict of a lesser
|charge even if it was not brought, but most of them are not informed of
|this power--whether they should be is a topic of fairly hot debate.


No debate about it from the judges and lawyers standpoint. A good
friend's wife was an Assistant DA and is now a judge so I have had
some conversations about this. The last thing in the world they want
to see is an informed jury and "jury nullification" is really
something they don't want to talk about.

In their eyes, juries should be just like mushrooms.

Judges decide that the law is what *they* say it is, not what the
statutes say. They sure don't want some dumb jury deciding what the
law is, even though they have that right.