Racially Based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System
![handle is hein.journals/ylr105 and id is 711 raw text is: Essay
Racially Based Jury Nullification:
Black Power in the Criminal Justice System
Paul Butlert
Wonders do not confuse. We call them that
And close the matter there. But common things
surprise us. They accept the names we give
with calm, and keep them. Easy-breathing then
We brave our next small business. Well, behind
Our backs they alter. How were we to know.'
Gwendolyn Brooks
[T]he time that we're living in now... is not an era where one who
is oppressed is looking toward the oppressor to give him some system
or form of logic or reason. What is logical to the oppressor isn't
logical to the oppressed. And what is reason to the oppressor isn't
reason to the oppressed. The black people in this country are
beginning to realize that what sounds reasonable to those who exploit
us doesn't sound reasonable to us. There just has to be a new system
of reason and logic devised by us who are at the bottom, if we want
to get some results in this struggle that is called the Negro
revolution.2
Malcolm X
t Associate Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School. This Essay was supported
by a research grant from Dean Jack Friedenthal of George Washington University Law School. It was
presented as a work-in-progress at the Mid-Atlantic People of Color Legal Scholarship Conference and
before the junior faculty at George Washington. In addition to the participants in those meetings, the author
thanks Burlette Carter, Robert Cottrol, Jayne Jerkins, Steven Kim, William Rubenstein, Katheryn Russell,
Mark Srere, Carol Steiker, and Robert Tuttle. This Essay is dedicated to Legertha Butler Walton, the
author's mother. She is the reason that he is a law professor, hoping to salvage the lives of some desperate
people, and not one of those desperate people.
I. GWENDOLYN BROOKS, The Artists' and Models' Ball, in THE BEAN EATERS 67, 67 (1960).
2. Malcolm X, Speech at the Leverett House Forum of March 18, 1964, in THE SPEECHES OF
MALCOLM X AT HARVARD 131, 133 (Archie Epps ed., 1968).
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Racially Based Jury Nullification: Black Power in the Criminal Justice System
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