A juror may favor neither the poor defendant nor the powerful state

The people camped below Sinai had made bricks for Pharaoh. Early in their slavery, two midwives had been ordered to kill Hebrew baby boys and didn't. Now Moses was giving them laws for their own towns, where neighbors would sit at the gate and settle each other's cases. You might expect a law for former slaves to lean toward the poor. This one tells judges not to lean at all.

On October 13, House Oversight chair James Comer sent letters to two Washington groups, Free DC and Harriet's Wildest Dreams, demanding the materials from their juror trainings. By Comer's account, the sessions teach residents to get seated and then vote to "protect our people." At one session, trainer Qiana Johnson told the room, "You have this superpower, and that superpower is you are able to nullify" a jury. In The Hill on October 24, Jonathan Turley granted that urging this is protected speech, but said it "effectively encourages jurors to lie when they take their oath."

Nullification means voting not guilty while believing the defendant did it. In 1851, Boston juries would not convict the men charged with pulling Shadrach Minkins out of a courthouse before he could be sent back to slavery. In 1955, a Mississippi jury took about an hour to acquit the two men who killed Emmett Till, and the men later told Look magazine they had done it. Both juries set the law aside, though most of us would honor one and be ashamed of the other.

Leviticus tells them apart.

In Hebrew it warns against lifting up the face of the poor or honoring the face of the great. The picture is a judge who looks at faces when he should look at deeds. The Till jury judged faces: white defendants, a Black boy from Chicago. The Boston jurors judged what the law itself was doing, sending a man back into chains, and like the midwives they wouldn't lend their hands to it.

Exodus 1:17-1917But the midwives feared God, and didn't do what the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the baby boys alive.18The king of Egypt called for the midwives, and said to them, "Why have you done this thing, and have saved the boys alive?"19The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women aren't like the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous, and give birth before the midwife comes to them."

Their answer to Pharaoh was a dodge, and the text tells it without apology. But the king they dodged wanted newborns killed. The cases in Washington are misdemeanors, a thrown sandwich among them. And "protect our people" is a promise about who the defendant is, which is the face the law says not to lift. The government has a face too, and Leviticus is just as hard on it. During last year's federal surge, D.C. grand juries refused three times to indict Sidney Lori Reid, and a trial jury later acquitted her. Jurors who trusted the charges because the U.S. attorney brought them would have spared everyone the trouble, and they would have been honoring the face of the great.

Sinai gave judgment to ordinary neighbors at the gate, so the jurors are the authority in that room, and the only question is how they use it. What the old law asks of them is hard and simple: look at what was done, whoever's face is in front of you.