\n\nJury nullification as discussed on the Internet: Keeping some who wasn\u2019t hurting anyone from going to jail for violating some bullshit law
\nJury nullification IRL: Keeping someone who was violent against someone subverting the social order out of jail
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Absolutely correct. For an example, check out this series on \u201cThe Unwritten Law\u201d - the turn-of-the-century practice of acquitting (as \u201ctemporary insanity\u201d) men who had determinedly stalked and killed the rakes who had sex with their women.\n
\nTwo interesting points here: one, that this \u201cLaw\u201d metastasized to the point of undermining ALL murder laws, as defendants would offer this difficult-to-disprove backstory.
\n\nTwo, that the government (under threat of losing the ability to credibly punish killings) responded not with crackdowns but by accommodating the desire to punish adulterers - criminal laws against adultery were passed or rediscovered, likewise \u201cheartbalm\u201d civil actions - \u201ccriminal conversation\u201d and \u201calienation of affection\u201d. \n
\nDefendants could even claim a formalized, if limited equivalent to \u201ctemporary insanity\u201d defenses - a man who caught his wife in the actual act of sex with another, \u201cin flagrante delicto\u201d was entitled to kill either or both of them, and men who knew or suspected adultery would arrange such \u201csurprise\u201d discoveries for the purpose of claiming a righteous kill.\n
\nThat\u2019s not the only place in American history to show that pattern - citizens use lethal violence as means of social control, government responds by cracking down not on them but their targets in hopes of rewinning assent to a government monopoly on violence by proving itself willing to use it as they would prefer. Many southern states tightened \u201cJim Crow\u201d racial codes between the World Wars as part of an attempt to stop lynchings, many victims of which were in jail awaiting trial when they were seized by mobs unwilling to trust the courts with their punishment.
\n\nAnd labor leftists bitch that American strike action is too constrained under the Taft-Hartley Act, but that governments that stand for the suppression of mob violence, extortion, and trespassing would at all allow a mob to forcefully lay sieges on private property with the intent of extracting concessions from its owner \u2013 let alone defend them and enforce the resultant contracts \u2013 is nonobvious. What it is is the same thing - over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries the people had made clear there would be labor militancy, and the government shrugged and decided it preferred it to be backed by the threat of violence by existing government institutions, rather than open violence by private actors who might eventually seek to supplant those institutions.
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