Mr. Manzano exercised extraordinarily poor judgment, and he is independently facing state charges for second-degree sexual assault. But the federal charges against him — a threatened minimum of 15 years, all for taking and deleting a private video, in a non-coerced context, that no one but government investigators ever saw — are grossly disproportionate, and exemplify the problems with mandatory minimum sentences in general. As such, Mr. Manzano’s attorney sought to introduce evidence of the mandatory minimum sentence and to argue for conscientious acquittal (or “jury nullification”) — i.e., to argue that even if Manzano’s factual guilt was proven, it would be manifestly unjust for the jury to convict him, in light of the extreme mandatory minimum sentence.
The District Court judge did not conclusively resolve these motions, but it did indicate openness to letting Manzano’s counsel try to introduce evidence of the mandatory minimum, and said that if the evidence came in, he would allow argument about it. In other words, this is the extraordinarily rare case where a district court showed even tentative openness to arguments sounding in conscientious acquittal. But even those conditional, preliminary rulings were too much for the prosecutor to accept; the government stayed the trial, and is now seeking the extraordinary remedy of a writ of mandamus from the Second Circuit, asking the appellate court to prohibit the District Court from permitting any evidence or argument about conscientious acquittal. In other words, according to the United States, keeping a jury in the dark about the actual consequences of conviction is so vital that it warrants stopping a trial and overriding the traditional discretion of district court judges to rule on evidentiary questions as they arise.
The Cato Institute, joined by FAMM and the NACDL, has therefore filed an amicus brief, urging the Second Circuit to deny the government’s petition. Not only is the District Court’s preliminary ruling well within its discretion, but the judge’s approach is also eminently reasonable, as it thoughtfully harmonizes many tensions in the modern case law of conscientious acquittal. Our brief argues that, throughout the Anglo-American legal tradition, pre-dating even Magna Carta, juries have always possessed the inherent authority to acquit defendants in the face of manifestly unjust prosecutions. This power was well-established in the Founding Era, in which juries were regularly aware of — and tailored their verdicts to — the consequences of conviction. And while modern cases (perhaps erroneously) do not generally afford defendants the right to argue for conscientious acquittal, no controlling cases preclude a district court from permitting such arguments.
Protecting the discretion of district court judges in this regard is all the more important today, in light of the vanishingly small role jury trials play in our criminal justice system. Today, jury trials have been all but replaced by plea bargaining as the baseline for criminal adjudication, and severe mandatory minimums, like the one at issue here, are a major driver of this trend. Preserving the possibility that juries may, in appropriate cases, be informed about the consequences of conviction is a small but vital safeguard against the wholesale erosion of the jury trial itself.
