But as the quotation from the Supreme Court's opinion in Standefer indicates, in language originally employed by Judge Learned Hand, the power of juries to "nullify" or exercise a power of lenity is just that--a power; it is by no means a right or something that a judge should encourage or permit if it is within his authority to prevent. It is true that nullification has a long history in the Anglo-American legal system, see Dougherty, 473 F.2d at 1130-33, and that the federal courts have long noted the de facto power of a jury to render general verdicts "in the teeth of both law and facts," Horning v. District of Columbia, 254 U.S. 135, 138, 41 S.Ct. 53, 54, 65 L.Ed. 185 (1920); see, e.g., United States v. Trujillo, 714 F.2d 102, 105-06 (11th Cir.1983). However, at least since the Supreme Court's decision in Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51, 102 (1895) (holding that, while juries are finders of fact, "it is the duty of juries in criminal cases to take the law from the court and apply that law to the facts as they find them"), courts have consistently recognized that jurors have no right to nullify. See Gordan, supra, at 272, 277 (noting that, with Sparf, the Supreme Court "fixed the law where Lord Mansfield had left it" in King v. Shipley ("The Dean of St. Asaph's Case"), 4 Doug. 73 (K.B. 1784), in which Mansfield had written that jurors have the power, but not the right, to decide the law); Howe, supra, at 589 (referring to Sparf as "the Supreme Court's final and authoritative denial of the [jury's] right" to serve as judges of the law); see, e.g., United States v. Kerley, 838 F.2d 932, 938 (7th Cir.1988) ("[J]ury nullification is just a power, not also a right ...."). As a panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit--composed of Chief Judge Spottswood W. Robinson, III, Judge George E. MacKinnon, and then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg--explained:
A jury has no more "right" to find a "guilty" defendant "not guilty" than it has to find a "not guilty" defendant guilty, and the fact that the former cannot be corrected by a court, while the latter can be, does not create a right out of the power to misapply the law. Such verdicts are lawless, a denial of due process and constitute an exercise of erroneously seized power.
United States v. Washington, 705 F.2d 489, 494 (D.C.Cir.1983) (per curiam) (emphasis in original). Indeed, as we noted above, the exercise of this de facto power is a violation of a juror's sworn duty to "apply the law as interpreted by the court." United States v. Boardman, 419 F.2d 110, 116 (1st Cir.1969), cert. denied, 397 U.S. 991, 90 S.Ct. 1124, 25 L.Ed.2d 398 (1970).
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