Just another theatre nerd

Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (eds.), Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement

Elizabeth Hinton, America On Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s

Mariame Kaba, We Do This Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transformative Justice

Colin Kaepernick (ed.), Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future Without Policing and Prisons

Robin DG Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Victoria Law, "Prisons Make Us Safer" and 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

Zena Sharman, The Care We Dream Of: Liberatory and Transformative Approaches to LGBTQ+ Health

Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)

Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

Universal single payer healthcare

Restore reproducive healthcare

Protecting trans rights

Passing the Equality Act

Ending mass deportation

Term limits for Congress

$25/hr minimum wage

Support for rural medical care and schools

$3000/month for stat at home parents

https://www.wfla.com/news/briana-boston-case-how-would-attorneys-defend-against-threat-accusation/

Jury Nullification is when a jury finds a defendant Not Guilty even though they (perhaps secretly) believe them to be guilty.

In the United States, this has come up primarily in the case of 'escaped slave laws'. Good people are not willing to send formerly enslaved people back to their captors.

Governments hate this sort of behavior. But it's hard to stop. How have they tried?

1. They keep it secret. Jurors are not informed of this possibility. Activists who talk to jurors in front of courthouses have been arrested.

2. Jury Selection. Anyone who brings up nullification in jury selection gets removed. All jurors musts agree to "accept as correct the rulings and instructions of the law as provided by the judge." But they can't stop you from changing your mind.

3. Declare a Mistrial. If the defense or anyone else mentions nullification, they can scrub the whole thing and try again with a fresh jury. They will also find excuses to strike individual jurors if they need to.

4. They Flat Out Lie to You. Quoting Wikipedia here:

In 2017, a jury was instructed: "You cannot substitute your sense of justice, whatever that means, for your duty to follow the law, whether you agree with it or not. It is not for you to determine whether the law is just or whether the law is unjust. That cannot be your task. There is no such thing as valid jury nullification. You would violate your oath and the law if you willfully brought a verdict contrary to the law given to you in this case." The Ninth Circuit upheld the first three sentences of the jury's instruction and overruled the remainder but deemed that instruction a harmless error and affirmed the conviction.[67]

So expect scary people to tell you that you are breaking the law if don't give the verdict they want you to give.

But you don't have to do what they tell you to. If you find yourself on a jury you can come to whatever conclusions your conscience demands.

Maybe that bag of weed looks like oregano to you. Maybe that gun looks like a prop. Maybe the cop or the prosecutor seems shifty. Perhaps the defendant just has an honest face.

they don't say what types of laws one might use it against; I'm pretty sure this is 1. so they don't get shut down and 2. so they can be effective at a specific niche of political education.

that's not my niche, so I want to encourage you to remember jury nullification if you are summoned for jury duty of any kind, not just new explicitly Trumpy laws. if you oppose mass incarceration, if you understand the ways that the US prison system makes shit worse for individual people and for society, jury nullification is such a concrete thing to do.