Civil disobedience is easy to praise from a distance.
Everybody loves the man who stands up to the state.
Everybody shares the story.
Everybody cheers when someone says no.
But most people do not want to be the one dragged into court, bankrupted by lawyers, threatened with jail, or made an example of by prosecutors who exist to remind the rest of us what happens when we get out of line.
That is not cowardice.
That is self-preservation.
But it is also why the liberty movement so often becomes the liberty stand-around-and-argue-with-each-other movement.
We love brave men.
We just prefer they be someone else.
That is where jury nullification matters.
Because the state can write the law. The police can make the arrest. The prosecutor can bring the charges. The judge can wear the robe and speak in sacred tones.
But they still need a jury to convict.
And a jury does not have to help enforce an immoral law.
Look at Jeffrey Scott Sovern in Virginia.
He has pleaded not guilty after being charged with destroying 13 Flock license plate cameras. The state says the crime is the destruction of government-approved surveillance equipment.
A lot of free people would say the crime is building a mass surveillance network in the first place.
If you are on that jury, the real question is not merely, “Did he do it?”
The real question is, “Was there a victim?”
And if the only alleged victim is the machinery of the surveillance state, then a good jury should have a serious problem calling that justice.
That same principle applies far beyond Flock cameras.
Julie Bass in Oak Park, Michigan, faced the threat of jail because she planted vegetables in her front yard instead of keeping the government-approved lawn.
Gary Harrington in Oregon was sentenced to jail and fined for storing water in reservoirs on his own land without the state’s permission.
Adam Guerrero, a teacher in Tennessee, faced city action over a community garden.
Across the country, people have been fined, threatened, prosecuted, and harassed for chickens, gardens, raw milk, tiny homes, rainwater, sheds, home businesses, zoning violations, and other peaceful acts that harmed nobody.
That is the key.
Nobody.
A real crime requires a real victim.
The state is not a person.
The state cannot be offended like a person. It cannot be trespassed against like a person. It cannot have rights like a person. The state exists, supposedly, to protect individuals from aggression.
So when the state prosecutes a peaceful person for violating a rule that harmed no actual human being, the jury should not ask how quickly it can rubber-stamp the punishment.
The jury should ask why it is being asked to punish him at all.
This is why jury nullification terrifies people in power.
It reminds them that the law is not magic.
A law is only enforceable if ordinary people agree to enforce it.
If juries refused to convict people for victimless crimes, many of these laws would become useless overnight.
Not because politicians repealed them.
Not because courts rediscovered the Constitution.
Not because bureaucrats had a change of heart.
But because twelve ordinary people looked at the state and said, “No.”
That is real power.
And it is power most Americans were never taught they had.
We are told jury duty is an inconvenience. A chore. A civic annoyance.
It is not.
The jury box may be the last peaceful place where an ordinary citizen can stand between a peaceful person and the state trying to destroy him.
That is why I talk about jury nullification.
That is why I made the “Ask Me About Jury Nullification” shirt.
Not because a shirt changes the world.
Because conversations do.
One conversation can become one juror.
One juror can hang a jury.
One jury can save a man.
And enough juries refusing to enforce immoral laws can make those laws impossible to use.
The next Jeffrey Scott Sovern, Julie Bass, Gary Harrington, or Adam Guerrero should not have to stand alone.
If the state wants to punish peaceful people for refusing to obey bad laws, it should have to get past us first.
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