So one thing I discovered this business with Patterico is that he apparently finds me untrustworthy because I made in a error in this column last year on jury nullification. He says he sent me an email pointing out the error, and my failure to correct it I guess undermines my credibility in his eyes.

I did make the mistake. And frankly, I wasn’t aware of it until I saw his post in a comments section. I mistakenly refered to the opinion in U.S. v. Dougherty as a Supreme Court opinion. In fact, the case was decided in the D.C. Court of Appeals (though the Supreme Court apparently didn’t object enough to review it).

I don’t doubt Patterico sent the email, but I didn’t get it. That’s probably my fault. I get 200-300 email responses to a typical Fox column — two or three times that if the topic is controversial and gets promotion on the front page of the Fox website. I try to read them all, but sometimes don’t have the time. So it’s likely that I simply didn’t see it.

I don’t think the error does much to undermine the larger point I was making in citing that case — that the founders intended for nullification to be part of our criminal justice system, and that it has a long tradition both in U.S. courts and in English common law.

But I did make a mistake, so I’ll correct it. I’ll also run a correction in my next Fox column.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 9:37 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.