Jury nullification is the return of a non-guilty verdict even though the jury has belief that the defendant is guilty. Paul Butler, a former lawyer and prosecutor and a current law professor at Georgetown University, presented the idea of jury nullification as a tool to combat racial injustice as perceived by African Americans and to push political agendas among the common people. Jury nullification can be an incredibly effective tool to combat issues in African American communities that have been pushed into the mainstream through the efforts of Black writers and activists like Michelle Alexander and Ta-Nehisi Coates. In order to limit the scope of this article, I will only discuss jury nullification as a tool to assist non-violent drug offenders although it is my personal belief that Black jurors should utilize this tool in consideration of most non-violent drug offenders in general.

In order to discuss the efficacy of jury nullification in defending Black people, the history of the use of jury nullification must first be observed. Critics of the process of jury nullification often discuss the message that these verdicts could send to those who commit crimes encouraging them to commit these crimes. Statistics have shown, even if non-violent drug offenders are convicted, they are still arrested at a rate of 76.9% after release for similar crimes. The real way to prevent the committing of crimes is to combat the systematic and economic laws and principles that allow for the crimes to be committed. To illustrate this point, examine the most wide and highly hidden use of jury nullification in the United States: defense of white defendants who committed violent crimes against Black people in the post-Civil war era. Because juries were all-white, especially in the deep south, juries would use jury nullification to protect white offenders who lynched or viciously beat African Americans and other minorities. This practice of committing similar crimes and juries nullifying continued until the system of Jim Crow laws changed giving whites less social and political backing to commit these crimes. While, in the present century, I would only recommend the use of jury nullification as a racial protectant for non-violent offenders, the benefits of using jury nullification as a strategy to combat the disparities between sentencing of non-violent and violent offenders and to force lawmakers to combat drug criminals through improvement of low-income communities rather than creating stricter and more aggressive drug laws.

Combatants of jury nullification also ask, "why shouldn't all races be able to utilize this tool? Isn't the use of jury nullification an obstruction of justice for everyone who is not African American?" Those questions misrepresent the fact that other races, specifically whites, have used jury nullification throughout American history to attack issues ranging from prohibition all the way to crimes of non-violent nature and violent crimes, including racial crimes such as the beating of Rodney King. In many cases, this use of jury nullification obstructed justice for other and significantly disadvantaged them legally and morally. In addition, these questions fail to consider the systematic injustice and racial impropriety that African Americans have experienced throughout American history and how these injustices have set Black people back in society.

Here's my personal cry to Black people. Each of us have a unique opportunity to make the voice of African Americans heard in the justice system without having to have specific legal training. Use jury duty as a tool for each African Americans duty to defend African-American people and to combat the system used to aggressively attack non-violent offenders. Be prepared, after consideration of facts, to let a "guilty" man free when laws are unjust.