The other thing is that jury nullification isn't a "thing". It's not in the law or in the Constitution. The reason that juries can vote their conscience and nullify is a side effect of the sanctity of a jury trial. Juries can also vote based on the latest baseball game results, if they wanted. And judges absolutely have the right to instruct juries not do do this.
I also think you'll find in practice people tend to support the system. Not everyone lives in your ideological pocket of reality, nor is it necessarily right to imagine they will once they are subjected to "widespread outreach and education". Everyone's got their own pet imaginary revolution and I think part of the reason people live in their own little mainstream-ish bubbles of reality isn't foolishness--it's a defense mechanism against every ideologue demanding their attention.
I think this article's gist is that the American judiciary is leveraged and thus vulnerable to disruption. The solution advocated, loosening laws to decrease case volume, is probably better than the alternative of directing more funding to the courts and prison system.
This systemic leverage pushes the judiciary to do unsavoury things, such as courts increasing penalties for those who choose trial by jury and over-zealous AGs putting elections above fairness.
It may be hyperbole to call shining light on potential civil liberty abuses petty.
>people tend to support the system
As of 2011 the US judiciary stood at 63% approval [1] - this is a good, especially when compared to Congressional approval, but the lowest since 1973. People also tend to pay less attention to the judicial than executive and legislative branches.
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/149906/supreme-court-approval-rat...
Leverage compels the innocent to plead guilty, and the thought exercise of "crashing the system" will not work because the stakes are too high. There's usually evidence such that a refusal to plead guilty will not affect the outcome very much. Applied to purely innocent suspects, there is no guarantee that refusing to plead will result in a not guilty verdict.
The same sort of problem is present in the investment markets. The fact that something might be over-leveraged as the fundamentals deteriorate does not guarantee profits if you try to short. To quote Keynes, (possibly the one thing he wrote that I whole-heartedly agree with) "Markets can remain irrational far longer than you or I can remain solvent."
It's quite possible that overworked juries and judges would wrongly convict more people by rushing to judgment if they had 10 times the caseload.
Crashing the over-leveraged legal system by flooding it with not guilty pleas may not cause the system to blink; instead, it might cause the courts to degenerate into a Kafkaesque nightmare.
This. Proponents of jury nullification seem to think that a juror needs to have revealed from on high the idea that a jury can decide to flout the law and issue whatever verdict it wants. The reason why juries don't do this isn't because their minds can't conceive of this fact, but because the majority of people understand the importance of rule of law, and that they have a responsibility that extends beyond the scope of the case at hand.
But it is precisely because of the importance of the rule of law that the enforcement of unjust laws, or the enforcement of a law that may be broadly just but fails to be so in a particular circumstance, must be resisted.
I don't know that the majority of people have really stopped to reflect on that.
The great thing about jury nullification is that there's no collective action problem. A single juror can make a difference for one case.
So the best approach is probably to pick one vulnerable jurisdiction (with little excess capacity), focus first on jury nullification to reduce the risk of jury trial, then work on reducing plea bargains.
If you combined the author's idea of everyone requesting jury trials, with a widespread outreach and education about jury nullification, it would be a really interesting thing to watch. When the people were speaking directly through the process as to what they the people felt should be illegal and what wasn't.
Yes it would be chaotic, the question though is if we could exit that chaos into a better place.