Ethics of Jury nullification and TDT?

(Though apparently -- and outrageously -- one has to be careful here: I know a mathematician who once served on a jury and was accused of juror misconduct for presenting "facts not in evidence" to his fellow jurors, namely "the mathematical theory of probability"!)

Really? Not a witness, defendant, lawyer, but a juror used their knowledge of probability and that counted as bringing in "facts not in evidence"??? What's the point of having a jury if the jury members can't, you know, actually make any use of their knowledge? What's next, "basic reasoning skills are not part of the actual evidence, so you're not allowed to think when deciding"? Excuse me, I have to go foam at the mouth now. :p

Anyways, as far as the rest, that essentially is part of my concern. (Though you detailed it much more completely than my own thoughts did, but fuzzy thinking along those lines was part of my concern)

Hence my quandary: If presented with a drug use case, should I nullify if defendant is "guilty"?

It seems to me that it might be possible to extract some of these intuitions without all of them.

For example, say that the "rules as written down" are something along the lines of "we get a group of your peers to determine whether you've done something wrong, and if you have what it is. Then we decide based on precedent what your sentence is."

In that case, members of the jury are capable of deciding that defendants have not done anything wrong, even if there is a specific punishment listed for what the defendant did.

I don't mean to argue that this is what is the case, for example I don't believe that the rules I described are a good representation of US criminal law. But that is a fact about the specific system you are involved in; I don't believe that it is a priori problematic to have "jury nullification" in the sense of jurors acquitting persons who committed "crimes."

Beautiful. Very well said. I expressed similar intuitions, but you make the point much better. (Not that our arguments are in perfect agreement, but we're both appealing to implications of nullification for the rule of law.)

Yes, a conviction for an unjust law is bad -- that's not in dispute. The problem is whether you are appropriately fighting this injustice by nullifying, if you reason by TDT, a decision theory that ranks very well on numerous desiderata that account for these intuitions. Appealing to specific moral duty doesn't resolve the problem, for the same reason that appealing to greed doesn't justify two-boxing on Newcomb's problem.

For my part, I do have a big problem with drug laws (despite not planning to use them). And before thinking about this as a rationalist, I did favor jury nullification. But if I put my TDT hat on, here are the problems I see with it:

Like what loqi said, if jurors tended to nullify, then the system, anticipating this, would either not use juries, or resort to extremely stringent screening methods to make sure there are no nullifiers (potentially involving massive violations of privacy for jurors, which in turn has to make them very circumspect about talking about their political views... even today people complain about the intrusiveness of questions jurors get asked). Or reduce the conviction difficulty threshold so that they can allow a conviction to go through if jurors acquit "for a bad reason".

(I think this is similar to the old debate about whether you should cut down the law to get to the devil -- or Hitler, etc. Or whether a judge in a slavery-supporting society who "sees the light" should suddenly start ignoring the laws and make whatever decisions go against slavery.)

TDT asks you to consider the consequences, conditioning on yourself (and all similar instantiations of your algorithm) being the kind of person who would keep quiet about your opinion on nullification and the particular law, and then nullify if you didn't like the law.

This seems to be equivalent to setting humans to take the policy of "using any discretion I have to bend application of laws in the direction of the legal regime I prefer". But if humans deemed this optimal, it would not be possible to have a "rule of law" system, where there are definite laws, and people can know when they're breaking them, and which disallows favoritism. It would probably not be possible to implement any law except those which are extremely popular (which may be a good thing).

So I'm forced to conclude that jury nullification is in the unfortunate position of "feeding off of its own existence", like stealing or two-boxing. While it may appear that it's a chance to shift utility toward people you like, your deciding to do so has broader implications.

So at the very least you should say upfront that you regard it as optimal to nullify unjust laws, which will get you tossed out of the pool but otherwise unhurt. (I've heard that if you even exhibit familiarity with related keywords, that's enough to get dismissed.)

I don't have the link handy, but I recall reading that judges are completely within their rights to dismiss a juror who is openly planning to nullify. If this is true, then honesty is not a viable strategy.

Now there's an interesting thought. :)

Though, realistically, given the fraction of the population that would see this and to what extent anyone here could track how each of us decides and our reasons for doing so when we're jury members, probably not. However, reducing from the sorta acausal abstractions of TDT to simple iterated games may at least help to think about it, may help provide some useful intuition pumps at least.

So, given that we're now in an iterated game with respect to nullification style issues... What's the right answer? (Actually, legal system stuff is complicated, so even figuring out how to partition the players, not to mention the payoff matrix, is going to be tricky.)

But, the algorithm itself isn't the same as the values I input into it.

What I mean by that is that I'm going "I think drug laws are unjust... THEREFORE I should refuse to convict in the case of a violation of those laws"

So is the "If I, personally, think a set of laws are seriously unjust, should I essentially ignore them when I'm a jury member?"

(note, my natural initial inclination was "yes, nullification of drug laws is a good idea", with the only question being "do I lie when asked in the first place if I'd be willing to convict on a drug offense or if I'd heard of nullification" etc... But once I got to thinking about it, to the actual algorithm I'm effectively running, well, hence my eventual asking here for advice)

Well, first question is "should I consider nullification type stuff a good idea at all?"

Second, is if I consider the answer to be yes, should I be willing to lie about it? That seems even more shaky. I'm thinking ethical injunctions here and such. (ie, "don't go lying about relevant stuff in the context of a court/justice system (at least one that is vaguely reasonably fair) "

So yeah, that's a second question.

And "the Right Thing" being "respect the principle of the rule of law even if I find the law in question repugnant" or "respect the principles of justice as best as I individually determine them ignoring any considerations of the value of rule of law"?

(Note: my natural inclination is to favor nullification of the drug laws. But once I got thinking about it, well, hence my asking my fellow aspiring rationalists for advice)

What if TDT is optimally ethical?

You know, its major selling point to begin with?