#4 - Global Reference, Must Be True, Author's Perspective

[ashpine17]

I thought both A and D could work. I thought passage A would agree with A while B wouldn't because he would think if a jury nullifies a ruling then they must have a compelling reason.

[Adam Tyson]

The problem with that analysis, ashpine, is that the author of passage A never says anything about whether juries SHOULD be more forthcoming. All they say on that topic is that one of the reasons nullification is bad is because we don't know what led the juries to nullify and therefore can't determine whether they had a good reason or not.

And author B also never addresses the issue, so we cannot say with any certainty that they would disagree with that statement.

The answer to a question like this has to be based clearly on the text of what each author said, and not on any assumptions we might make about what they think about things they did not discuss. Neither author talks about whether juries should or should not be more forthcoming about their reasoning, so there is no support for answer A in either passage.

[lemonade42]

Hi I'm confused on the 2 parts in (D).

Apply part:
I'm confused how the sentence "Jury nullification occurs when the jury acquits the defendant in a criminal case in disregard of the judge’s instructions..." shows that A would agree with applying the law. To me, it doesn't sound like the law is being used. They are just saying their answer to acquit the defendant.

I'm also confused on how B shows agreement with applying the law. Because I thought when the stimulus says "When a jury nullifies because it does not believe a law should be applied to a particular defendant..." that meant that the jury is not using the law (not applying the law), and therefore using their own judgement (which is not law) and ignoring the judges instructions.

Interpret part:
I understand how A disagrees and B agrees with this

So overall, you're saying that it doesn't matter whether A and B agree or disagree about the "apply" part. All we know is that they disagree is about the "interpret part" and that's sufficient to say that they disagree about the whole answer choice as a whole?

[Jeff Wren]

Hi lemonade,

So "applying the law" is what juries do whenever they render a decision. A jury's job is to hear information about the law(s) at issue and the relevant facts and then decide whether one or more laws has been broken based on the facts. In other words, apply the law to the facts. There's really nothing controversial about the idea that juries apply the law as that is their exact job.

In Answer D, the key is that the answer is saying it not just the jury's role to apply the law (which isn't really in dispute), but to also interpret it (i.e. jury nullification). This second part contains the critical issue on which the authors disagree.

If you prephrased the answer for this question, you should have a prephrase such as "the authors disagree over whether jury nullification is good or bad."

Answer D gets at this issue without using the actual term "jury nullification."