F A L L
N E B R A S K A A S S O C I AT I O N O F T R I A L AT T O R N E Y S
P R E S I D E N T ’ S
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VOLUME 32, NO. 3 2026
M E S S A G E
The Remarkable Jury In 1670, a jury in London was ordered to convict two men. The defendants were William Penn and William Mead, Quakers charged after Penn preached to a crowd in the street. The judge wanted a guilty verdict. The jury did not give him one. So, the judge sent them back. They returned again without the verdict he wanted. The jurors were locked up without food or drink and pressured to change their decision. When they nevertheless returned a verdict of not guilty, the court fined them and ordered them imprisoned.
INSIDE Members Perspective.........4 NATA PAC...........................6 NATA PAC Contributors.......8 Who’s Driving...................10 Rigged Responsibility.......18 Practice Pointers..............24 Inside NATA..................... 26 Verdicts & Settlements.... 36 Young Lawyers................ 38 Washington Update..........42 Know Who to Call............ 45
Four of the jurors refused to pay, among them the jury’s foreman, Edward Bushell. He was held in Newgate Prison for over two months until he challenged his imprisonment and won his release. The resulting decision, now known as Bushell’s Case, established a principle we largely take for granted: jurors cannot be punished for the verdict they reach. Twelve ordinary people were starved, threatened, and imprisoned because they would not give those in authority the answer they wanted. And they still said no. Sixty-five years later, John Peter Zenger, a New York printer, was tried for publishing criticism of the colony’s royal governor. The government’s position was simple: Zenger had published the material, and that was enough. His lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, asked the jury to consider whether what Zenger published was true, and to exercise its own judgment rather than accept the government’s position. The jury acquitted him. The Zenger trial did not create the First Amendment as we know it, but it became an enduring symbol of freedom of the press and of something equally important: the power of ordinary citizens sitting as jurors to stand between an individual and the government. An ocean and two generations apart, both stories share an idea. The jury was becoming more than a way to resolve disputed facts. It was becoming a check on power. By the Revolution, the colonists understood exactly how much that mattered. Among the grievances against King George III in the Declaration of Independence was that the King had deprived the colonists “in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” That complaint was not buried in a treatise on courtroom procedure. It appeared in a document explaining why thirteen colonies would separate from the most powerful empire in the world. The Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787 expressly protected the right to a jury in criminal prosecutions. It said nothing about civil juries. Americans noticed. As the document went to the states, opponents pressed the omission: they were being asked to approve a powerful new government with no guarantee that citizens would keep the right to have civil disputes decided by a jury. For people who had just fought a revolution against concentrated
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