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Food Not Bombs trial rescheduled after too many jurors objected to $500 fine for feeding homeless
(www.houstonchronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Both parties get a certain number (like 2 or 3) chances to excuse anyone, no reason required. Outside of that, you're raising technical reasons to the judge and the judge does the dismissing. If the judge doesn't buy the reason and the other party doesn't object, they may just end up on the jury.
This makes sense to me, but I also think that you shouldn't be able to dismiss the jury en masse more than once. Jury pools are what, 20-30 people? If they can't find 12 people and/or set 1 doesn't work out for some reason and the judge agrees, you get one more shot and either accept the hand you're dealt or drop the case.
When something of similar scope happens to the defense they can ask for a change of venue, and if it's granted that's it. The trial proceeds.
This is picked up on elsewhere in the thread that basically this, itself, is a form of jury nullification. If the law is so bad that they can't ever get a jury together to try a case, then that law is unenforceable and effectively nullified.
This sounds like an abstraction of a general "problem" in the system. If you set a law with consequences that no reasonable person would think is proportionate to the crime no jury will convict someone of the crime. It was a real problem back when the death penalty was too broadly applied.
One particular thing with the abortion ban debates that is overlooked is how common women killing children under the age of one used to be before birth control/abortion legality. In those eras courts (usually somewhere between 1850 and early 1900's) had to put new laws on the books to lower their punishments well off of full murder convictions because juries would refuse to apply full murder charges broadly to the category because at some level they accepted it as kind of a natural but volitle reaction to misery beyond the control of the person that the juries were very empathetic towards because a woman's lot being particularly miserable was an accepted social norm.
These "problems" have ways of figuring themselves out. If you can't reliably find a jury you have to change the law.