The idea of jury nullification has been around since this country had juries. The idea is pretty simple: juries can vote to acquit defendants, even when the government proves its case beyond a reasonable doubt. If you serve on a jury, and you listen to all the evidence, then you can still vote “not guilty.” And you can walk right out of the courthouse, and tell everyone that the guy did it, but you didn’t care. Maybe you didn’t like the law. Maybe you didn’t like the prosecutor. Whatever it is, it’s your right to vote to acquit. The defendant will walk. The judge and the government can’t do anything about it.
In the history of this country, jury nullification has been especially prominent in periods of open race hatred. During the 19th century, juries often refused to convict people who were accused of helping escaped slaves, in violation of the Fugitive Slave Act. Later, in the civil rights era, some all-white juries would acquit people who clearly committed acts of violence against blacks. So there are clearly good uses of jury nullification, and bad instances of it, as you’d expect. But on balance, this is a feature, not a bug, of our judicial system. That’s the conventional wisdom.
What’s not conventional wisdom — because no one is talking about it, even on the Right — is that jury nullification is making a major comeback right now. And this is not the jury nullification that Supreme Court justices like John Jay endorsed back in the day. I’m talking about a return of the civil rights era of jury nullification, where juries — egged on by prosecutors, in some cases — refuse to punish racist criminals who are obviously guilty. Only this time, the criminals are not white, they’re black. This is widespread at the moment in this country. It is impossible to deny. We have fully imported South African-style juries, where race and caste matters more than the facts of the case.
I’m going to start with one of the most egregious recent examples of jury nullification I’m talking about. This is a case involving the brutal killing of a 17-year-old white high school student in Akron, Ohio, named Ethan Liming. Last summer, Ethan Liming and his friends decided to do some stupid TikTok challenge, where they took a toy gel gun and fired it at random people.
Here’s the police chief in Akron explaining what the gun looks like and what it does:
So Ethan Liming and his friends, armed with this toy water gun, drove around and then they came across several young black men, ages 19 to 21, who were playing basketball in a parking lot near LeBron James’ “I Promise” school. And Liming’s friends made the very dumb decision to shoot at these black men with the toy gun. Evidence at trial, which includes surveillance footage, shows that the black men initially ran away, thinking they were under attack. But then, they turned back and charged at the car Liming was in. There was testimony that Liming fired some water pellets at the men who were now running at him. The key point here is that this was not a split-second thing where the black men attacked in self-defense, thinking the gun was real. They pursued Liming to get back at him for his prank.
What happened next is that Ethan Liming died a horrible death. When police arrived, they found blood coming from Liming’s mouth, ears, and nose. He hadn’t simply been punched in the face and given a black eye, although that’s true as well. He had been stomped. He had a broken collarbone. He had multiple blunt-force injuries all over his body. The coroner noted that there was a shoe print on his chest. Think about the amount of force that’s required to leave a shoe print on someone like that. Think about the savagery involved in this. At trial, the defense argued that Ethan Liming’s killers were in fear for their lives. They weren’t mad they had been pranked. Instead, they were deathly afraid of the water gun, so they went to town.
Is that plausible? Initially, prosecutors didn’t think so. That’s why they brought murder charges against the men responsible for this killing, which seems obviously appropriate given that the facts of the case simply don’t support a self-defense claim. Again, they pursued him, assaulted him, and stomped on him while he was on the ground. It was three against one, and after killing him they stole his car. Even if we were to accept the outlandish idea that they ran after this guy still thinking that he was a crazed shooter with a real gun, by the time they were stomping him to death on the ground it would have been exceedingly clear to everyone involved that he was not a threat. Also, keep in mind that at least one of the three assailants had been hit in the face with the water pellet. That couldn’t have felt very good, but it does mean that they obviously knew that it was a toy gun. Their lives were not in danger. They stomped him to death and stole his car because they were angry. This was murder, obviously. But the murder charges didn’t last long. Watch:
A couple of things about this. First of all, if the prosecutors had wanted the grand jury to indict on murder charges, they could’ve done that. That’s not really in dispute. Especially after the Trump prosecutions, where the grand jury wanted to indict everyone who’s ever talked to Trump, everyone knows how grand juries work in this country. There’s no defense counsel present. Prosecutors can basically say whatever they want to grand juries. And they can indict anyone for any crime.
So why didn’t prosecutors want murder charges here? Why did they effectively downgrade to a much less serious offense — involuntary manslaughter? Liming’s father spoke to local media about the prosecutors’ decision. He says that at least one prosecutor said that his son got what he deserved, in the form of “hood justice.” Watch:
You can believe what Liming’s father says, or you can choose not to believe it. Whatever the case, it’s objectively true that “involuntary manslaughter” is an absurdly lenient charge when you pummel someone on the ground after he fired a water gun at you. Involuntary manslaughter makes sense when you’re speeding and you hit someone in a crosswalk. When you’re standing over someone with a child’s toy, causing blood to come out of every orifice of his body, you’re probably committing a voluntary act called murder. At the very least, you’d think it would be up to a jury to decide that question.
But prosecutors in Akron didn’t see it that way. So the murder charge was off the table. And just by doing that — just by removing the prospect of murder from the case — prosecutors sent a very clear signal to jurors. That signal is that this was all an accident, at worst. No one really intended anyone to die. And just to reiterate that point, the prosecutors offered jurors another option. They could also convict the thugs of “assault.”
And lo and behold, that’s exactly what happened. This week Ethan Liming’s killers got off with a conviction for assault. They were acquitted of involuntary manslaughter. It’s as if they just got into a nasty bar fight. They’ll almost certainly be out of jail within two years, if not sooner. This is jury nullification, encouraged by prosecutors. There’s no other term you can use to describe this. And it’s not just happening in Akron.
Consider that just a few weeks ago, a jury found that a member of a black nationalist militia named Othal Wallace had committed manslaughter, instead of murder, after he shot a police officer to death on camera. Wallace shot this officer, named Jason Raynor, in the head. This was an unprovoked murder. Raynor was responding to a call of suspicious activity in an apartment complex, and Wallace killed him. Again, there’s no doubt about it. The murder was caught on body camera. Othal Wallace is not simply a member of a black nationalist group. After executing Jason Raynor, Wallace boasted on Instagram about putting “pigs” in their place. He fled to Georgia, where his black nationalist group — called NFAC, for the “Not F—ing Around Coalition” — helped him hide. Wallace also cut his dreadlocks to hide his appearance. This all came out in trial. Watch:
NFAC (Not F'ing around coalition) member Othal Wallace testified in his own defense today https://t.co/6Whma3OAxC
Probably didn't help him much & could definitely hurt him in a death penalty phase. Prosecution grilled him over social media posts about 'crackers' & 'killing pigs' https://t.co/STkA85Pbf8 pic.twitter.com/8trjMQ2FaM
— AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) September 14, 2023
After that testimony — after shooting a police officer in the face, and killing him — Othal Wallace was convicted of manslaughter. Not murder, which carries a possible death sentence, but manslaughter. The local sheriff said he has, “never been more disgusted by a verdict” in his entire career. You can see why.
Again, this is not simply jury nullification. This is race-based jury nullification that prosecutors are encouraging. In some cases, they’re not even leaving it to juries. They’re offering murderers really attractive plea deals, to short-circuit the whole trial process altogether. Remember the 41-year-old guy in North Dakota named Shannon Brandt? He confessed to killing Cayler Ellingson, who was a teenager. Why? Brandt was drunk, and he assumed that when Ellingson was on the phone with his mom, that he was really communicating with some MAGA Republican militia. So Brandt ran Ellingson over with his Ford Explorer and fled the scene. That’s murder, but Shannon Brandt wasn’t charged with murder. He was hit with manslaughter charges instead. Prosecutors offered him those charges as part of a plea deal, which of course he accepted.
There are many more examples like this. There’s the case of James McGee, who used a metal pipe to bludgeon a 62-year-old cab driver named Arif Mohammed Qasim to death back in 2019. He literally beat his brains out. San Francisco’s DA at the time let McGee plead to involuntary manslaughter, in the name of equity.
The same thing happened to the killer of Seth Smith, a Berkeley student who was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range by a lifelong criminal named Tony Walker. The moment homicide detectives reached out to Walker, he explained how frustrated he was that they cared about Smith’s death: “A white kid gets killed and the damn whole world stops… F—- that white motherf——-,” he said.
How did prosecutors respond? They offered Tony Walker a plea of manslaughter. That’s despite the fact that a probation officer determined that, “The defendant has demonstrated that he is a danger to the community and needs to be separated for the community’s protection … the defendant has established an entrenched pattern of criminal conduct that probation, prison and parole have been unable to eradicate.” Nevertheless, Tony Walker was not brought up on hate crimes charges, or thrown in prison for life, as he would be if he were white. This was not a repeat of the Ahmaud Arbery case with the races reversed. Instead, prosecutors let Tony Walker take a manslaughter plea. And for good measure, lawmakers in Berkeley later prevented police from running most parolee searches, like the one that led cops to apprehend Walker in the first place.
We could go on and on listing examples, but there’s one more very recent one we need to fit in here. A man named Calvin Ushery brutally assaulted, pistol-whipped, and robbed a jewelry store owner. The whole thing was caught on camera, plain as day. But guess what happened at trial? Watch:
The jury couldn’t reach a verdict. Ushery is on video walking into a jewelry store, grabbing the store owner, pistol-whipping him, stomping on his head, and beating him with a hammer before walking off with $100 thousand worth of stolen merchandise, He was charged with assault and robbery — because you can see him on camera assaulting and robbing. But the jury was deadlocked. We all know why it was deadlocked. There were members of that jury who didn’t want to convict a black man, no matter how obviously guilty he was.
This is what’s been happening in courtrooms all over the country, without any fanfare whatsoever. The Left has targeted conservatives, whether they’re politicians or pro-lifers or random people posting memes that offend Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows that. But at the same time, all over the country, the primary voting blocs of the Democratic Party are committing the most heinous crimes imaginable — including murder — only for prosecutors and juries to let them off the hook. They’re doing it deliberately. And in the process, they have established a true two-tiered justice system. A hierarchy where the severity of a crime is judged based on the demographics of those involved. And the lives of victims are ranked based on their race and their politics. Sadly for the family of Ethan Liming, he falls at the bottom of that totem pole, which means that there will be no justice for him. Because we are no longer a country that believes in justice.