Call it the luck of the Serbs. If deposed Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich had been charged with trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat in the months after September 11, he would have been shipped off to Guantanamo and never heard from again.

But since the economy collapsed in December 2007, Americans have been in a foul mood.  Their government couldn’t protect their jobs, their homes, their families, or the value of their money—while losing two wars against tribesmen armed with AK-47s.

Blago—his inevitable nickname—was charged by the feds with trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat vacated by President Obama.  On August 17, a jury of 12 men and women good and true deadlocked on all but one charge.  The one guilty verdict was for lying to the FBI, for which he could receive five years in a federal gulag.  “They ought to give you a medal for lying to the FBI,” a friend of mine quipped.  (The FBI can lie to you all it wants during an interrogation.)

That was the same cheap rap pinned on Martha Stewart, my favorite celebrity.  (She encourages ladies to be domestic.)  In more just times, lying got you behind bars only when you were under oath.

Juries can try not only the facts of the case but the law itself—an exercise called “jury nullification.”  Juries can do so openly, by rejecting a specific law.  Their finding applies to the specific case they are judging, not the overall law—although repeated nullification of a specific law can effectively negate it.  Or they can do so without any explanation, either because they don’t want to outrage a jealous judge, or because they know nullification only by intuition.  The effect is the same: The accused walks.

Blago’s jury clearly used nullification, Iloilo Jones told me.  She’s executive director of the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA)—based in Helena, Montana, not the imperial capital.  “People are becoming more concerned about what’s going on, especially collusion between prosecutors and judges,” she said.  “It’s becoming apparent that there is a great deal of prosecutorial abuse.  We need to educate jurors on what’s going on, because both prosecutors and judges work for the government.”

In the Blago case, she said, “everybody involved was with the government.  The jury wasn’t sure what to do.  The jurors were weary of the whole political posturing.  I’m proud of them.  Because they didn’t believe he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, they did the right thing.  They did not let themselves be led by the prosecutor [Patrick J. Fitzgerald].  We hope all jurors maintain a healthy skepticism toward what is presented by a prosecutor.”

FIJA, Jones said, now is “incredibly busy” across the country with such programs as the “Lunch Break for Liberty.”  Volunteers spend one lunch break per week in front of a courthouse distributing FIJA literature, hoping to inform jurors.  FIJA also is working on campuses to help students “know you can scrutinize the law.  As a juror, you can make sure there’s nothing that quashes people’s rights.”

Fitzgerald is pursuing another trial of Blago on the same counts, funded by an infinite supply of taxpayer money.  Yet the process is a usurpation of powers belonging to the people of Illinois, who can try their own officials for corruption—or not.  And it represents an executive-branch usurpation of the legislative powers of Congress.  According to the Constitution, “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members.”  The Senate, even in its debased form, is capable of deciding what to do with seats that are bought and sold.

Blago may be a crook and a scoundrel.  But our liberties are kept by winning hard cases.  May the charges against him always be nullified.