Occupy Wall Street Activist Found Guilty of Assaulting Police Officer

[Sylvan1]

33. If citizens were educated about the power of being a juror...

...they could deliver verdicts that were actually just. Most judges tell juries that they can only decide if someone has broken a law, not if the law is just. This is simply not true. Even if a defendant committed a crime, a jury can refuse to render a guilty verdict.
Reasons for a jury to do this, according to attorney Clay S. Conrad:

"When the defendant has already suffered enough, when it would be unfair or against the public interest for the defendant to be convicted, when the jury disagrees with the law itself, when the prosecution or the arresting authorities have gone “too far” in the single-minded quest to arrest and convict a particular defendant, when the punishments to be imposed are excessive or when the jury suspects that the charges have been brought for political reasons or to make an unfair example of the hapless defendant …"

Up to the time of the Civil War, American juries often refused to convict the brave souls who helped runaway slaves. In the 1800s, jury nullifications saved the hides of union organizers who were being prosecuted with conspiracy to restrain trade. Juries used their power to free people charged under the anti-alcohol laws of Prohibition, as well as antiwar protesters during the Vietnam era. Today, juries sometimes refuse to convict drug users (especially medical marijuana users), tax protesters, abortion protesters, gun owners, battered spouses, and people who commit “mercy killings.”

Judges and prosecutors will often outright lie about the existence of this power, but centuries of court decisions and other evidence prove that jurors can vote their consciences.

When the US Constitution was created, with its Sixth Amendment guarantee of a jury trial, the most popular law dictionary of the time said that juries “may not only find things of their own knowledge, but they go according to their consciences.” The first edition of Noah Webster’s celebrated dictionary (1828) said that juries “decide both the law and the fact in criminal prosecutions.”

If the average citizen were aware that juries are the peoples' defense against tyranny, they would behave with more autonomy and we would have fewer unjust verdicts and sentences.