Interesting thread! One of the great difficulties of judging jury verdicts is the fact that, other than the jurors who participated in the deliberations, none of us can really determine why a jury agreed (or failed to agree, as in the Nichols' case) on the verdict. Were the jurors who held out for a life sentence in the Nichols trial "nullification jurors" who simply opposed the death penalty? And, if so, how is it that they were not identified and removed for cause during jury selection? Or did they genuinely believe that Brian Nichols was insane (as defined by Georgia law) and thus did not merit the death penalty?
To complicate matters, death penalty instructions are notoriously complicated in terms of which jurors must agree to which "facts" to impose a death sentence. For example, in most states (including Georgia, I believe) jurors must unanimously agree that the prosecution has established the basic criteria for imposing a death sentence beyond a reasonable doubt. But with respect to "mitigating evidence" -- that is, facts that support a more lenient sentence, such as insanity -- individual jurors have a great deal of discretion to decide whether or not that evidence outweighs the reasons for imposing a death sentence. The jurors don't have to agree even on the existence of mitiganting evidence, much less its weight. So the "problem" with the Nichols jury may not have been the result of death penalty opponents on the jury, but rather that reasonable people can disagree about how to interpret the evidence, and the default position on the law in Georgia and elsewhere is life in prison when jurors do disagree.
Interesting thread! One of the great difficulties of judging jury verdicts is the fact that, other than the jurors who participated in the deliberations, none of us can really determine why a jury agreed (or failed to agree, as in the Nichols' case) on the verdict. Were the jurors who held out for a life sentence in the Nichols trial "nullification jurors" who simply opposed the death penalty? And, if so, how is it that they were not identified and removed for cause during jury selection? Or did they genuinely believe that Brian Nichols was insane (as defined by Georgia law) and thus did not merit the death penalty?
To complicate matters, death penalty instructions are notoriously complicated in terms of which jurors must agree to which "facts" to impose a death sentence. For example, in most states (including Georgia, I believe) jurors must unanimously agree that the prosecution has established the basic criteria for imposing a death sentence beyond a reasonable doubt. But with respect to "mitigating evidence" -- that is, facts that support a more lenient sentence, such as insanity -- individual jurors have a great deal of discretion to decide whether or not that evidence outweighs the reasons for imposing a death sentence. The jurors don't have to agree even on the existence of mitiganting evidence, much less its weight. So the "problem" with the Nichols jury may not have been the result of death penalty opponents on the jury, but rather that reasonable people can disagree about how to interpret the evidence, and the default position on the law in Georgia and elsewhere is life in prison when jurors do disagree.