What is jury nullification? What is jury nullification and what are its origins and history? What actions by a juror would be considered nullification?
Quoting from here, Jury nullification occurs when a jury returns a verdict of "Not Guilty" despite its belief that the defendant is guilty of the violation charged. The jury in effect nullifies a law that it believes is either immoral or wrongly applied to the defendant whose fate they are charged with deciding. In essence, a jury decides that a law should not be legal in the situation, and as such the charge is unwarranted. One of the first cases was in the trial of John Peter Zenger, in 1735, where a law against libels was used against him, and subsequently nullified by a jury. It was subsequently used against the famous Alien and Sedition Acts, as well as The Fugitive Slave Laws. Zenger was the first case in America; in 1670, it was used in the case of William Penn and William Mead, who were acquitted of "illegal assembly" as Quakers. In an interesting twist, the jurors were imprisoned, as jury nullification was not explicitly legal, but they were later released. Interestingly enough, according to The New York Times In 1895, the Supreme Court ruled that jurors had no right, during trials, to be told about nullification. The court did not say that jurors didn’t have the power, or that they couldn’t be told about it, but only that judges were not required to instruct them on it during a trial. The Times also wrote that nullification had been used against laws against alcohol and gay marriage, though it did not cite specific cases.
An alibi is a particular kind of defense strategy bearing on the burden of proof: here is the alibi jury instruction for California. The defendant contends (he/she) did not commit (this/these) crime[s] and that (he/she) was somewhere else when the crime[s] (was/were) committed. The People must prove that the defendant was present and committed the crime[s] with which (he/she) is charged. The defendant does not need to prove (he/she) was elsewhere at the time of the crime. &quot;I had put the gun down&quot; is not an alibi defense, &quot;I was not in my right mind at the time&quot; is not an alibi defense. The alibi defense is essentially a formality that clarifies the logic of &quot;reasonable doubt&quot; for the jury. If the defendant could not have committed the crime because they weren't there, then that is the end of the discussion. The prosecution will introduce various facts that suggest that the defendant may have committed the crime. The &quot;reasonable doubt&quot; instruction is widely interpreted by jurors to involve a defense obligation to disprove that evidence, which is a reason why a number of jurisdictions have adopted a different instruction based on &quot;being firmly convinced&quot;. Reasons to doubt prosecution evidence can be weak and highly speculative, and the courts have struggled for years to find a good way to convey exactly what &quot;reasonable doubt&quot; is. An alibi goes way beyond merely detracting from the prosecution's case. An alibi is not an affirmative defense where you have to prove the claim by a preponderance of evidence. If you can establish that you were somewhere else when the crime happened, had no opportunity to have committed the crime and could not have committed the crime by another means, you have defended yourself against the charge (assuming that the prosecution does not successfully challenge the credibility of the alibi witness). And in California, you have to give notice that you intend to use the alibi defense.
The term doesn’t come up Because, AFAIK, there are no circumstances where being ignorant of the law allow a person to escape culpability. There are, however, laws that allow ignorance of the facts to be an excuse. For example, a person who receives stolen goods where it is reasonable to believe that they aren’t is not guilty of the crime (although the still don’t own the goods).
"The purpose of the statute making the NTSB's reports of accidents inadmissible in actions arising out of such accidents is to exclude reports that express agency views as to the probable cause of the accident because that is a finding in the province of the jury or fact finder." Britton v. Dall. Airmotive, Inc., No. 1:07-cv-00547-EJL, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 163211, at *5-6 (D. Idaho May 20, 2011) (citations omitted). "The legislative history of this statute demonstrates that the purpose of this exclusionary rule is to prevent a usurpation of the jury's role as fact finder." McLeod v. ERA Aviation, No. 93-294, 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 3204, at *3 (E.D. La. Mar. 12, 1996) (citations omitted). "This limitation on the admissibility of the NTSB report, however, applies to the official conclusions of the NTSB, not to the factual accident reports of the investigators." Britton, 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 163211, at *6 (citation omitted); accord 49 C.F.R. § 835.2. By its terms, the statute applies only to civil actions, but the report would be subject to the ordinary hearsay rules if offered in a criminal case. See Fed. R. Evid. 801; United States v. PG&amp;E, 178 F. Supp. 3d 927, 946 (N.D. Cal. 2016).
Perjury is not 'not telling the truth'. It requires (in most jurisdictions) being proven to have deliberately lied under oath. As Xavier pointed out, you are not on oath when entering a plea (among other reasons, you would be required to incriminate yourself). Secondly, "I am not guilty" could mean anything from "the prosecution wrongly think that what I did is illegal" to "this law is unconstitutional" even if the facts are not in dispute; either may be mistaken without being a lie. If the facts are in dispute, the jury will have to deliver a verdict that implies (it does not state, let alone prove) that they disbelieve one party; deliberate falsehood, whether by a defendant or a police officer, would be several steps beyond that.
While it is true that jury instructions are typically less than optimal, it is ideological hyperbole or cynicism to claim that instructions are purposely confusing. The ultimate source of the confusion is that the legal system has to assume (pretend) that it has clear-cut rules that any reasonable person can easily understand and automatically apply. In order to maintain uniformity of the law, there is an externally-defined instruction that a judge may read (rather than giving his personal spin on what "reasonable doubt" means or what the relationship is between "reasonable doubt" and convicting a defendant). Once the relevant body of government (committee of judges and lawyers) has established the apparently correct formula for expressing the applicable legal concept, they don't mess with it, until SCOTUS overturns decisions enough times based on crappy instructions. Legal professionals are trained to carefully scrutinze language so as to achieve a single interpretation of a given clause (never mind the fact that there turn out to be many such interpretations). Since they can apply these interpretive rules, it is assumed that anyone can apply them. But in fact, we know that people don't just use literal semantic principles to reach conclusions – but the law resist pandering to that imperfection in human behavior. There is a huge literature on problems of jury instructions, some of the better of which relies on psycholinguistic experimentation to establish that a given instruction is confusing or gives the wrong result. See for example Solan's "Refocusing the burden of proof.." (and references therein) that addresses the problem of the "beyond a reasonable doubt" instruction, which has the unintended consequence of implying that the defense has an obligation to create a doubt (which is not the case, and allows conviction if there is the weakest imaginable evidence which hasn't been refuted). But who gets to decide what the improved instructions should say? The instructions have to correctly state what the law holds (where "the law" means not just statutes, but the trillions of relevant court decisions and applicable regulations). Thus there is massive inertia, and improved jury instructions will not come about quickly.
Impeachment is unique in that it is a question of politics, not a question of law, that is being discussed at trial. The other exception is that the Senate, not the Supreme Court, is the High Court of Impeachment (that is, legal precedence is based on what the Senate says, not what the Supreme Court or any other appellant court says). There are a few minor details, but the main part of the trial will play out like a criminal trial, with the Managers (people named by the house to argue the case) taking the role of the Prosecution and the Senate as the Jury. Because the trial is purely political in nature, a jurist decision to on the matter before evidence is presented at trial is entirely legal. It's actually perfectly legal to have your own opinion prior to trial start in a normal criminal jury and to vote on that ground... but the attorneys will dismiss you from the pool if they find even a hint of this. Unlike the judicial system, the jurists of Impeachment Trial are the same 100 people (presently) and cannot be dismissed for any reason, including comments about how they will find in the trial. Jury Fixing or tampering is when the decision a jurist makes is colored by some outside motivation to the jurists own convictions (i.e. the crime boss has your family and won't kill them if you find his hired goon innocent.). It could be an issue if a senator was given some pork to vote against his/her choice, but Impeachment is incredibly rare in the U.S. system and there hasn't been any case where this was an issue (If Articles of Impeachment are brought, this will be the 20 case to reach the trial stage since the adoption of the Constitution, and the 3rd for a President.).
Here are the jury instructions. These describe how to evaluate witness testimony, burdens of proof, and the four-factor fair use test, among other things. The jury had to answer yes or no to the following question: Has Google shown by a preponderance of the evidence that its use in Android of the declaring lines of code and their structure, sequence, and organization from Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4 and Java 2 Standard Edition Version 5.0 constitutes a "fair use" under the Copyright Act? They answered yes. Juries do not explain their reasoning (different jurors might even have different reasonings), but the assumption is that they followed the jury instructions to arrive at this conclusion. To be clear, the issue wasn't reimplementation of 37 Java APIs, but a more limited taking, including "the declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization".