He wants the jury in his trail to be made aware of jury-nullification.
The one thing that clouds this a bit is that the US government cannot constitutionally rule that someone has committed a crime without going through a jury trial. This means that there can never be summary judgement against a criminal defendant (it's mostly a civil litigation thing). Some interpret this as an attempt to explicitly create room for jury nullification. Others interpret this as an attempt to make sure that we never short-circuit the fact finding process in the name of expediency. In practice, it has both of these effects, but there's some debate as to which one is the theoretical grounding.
[1]- At least to the extent that humans can ever either establish a fact or reduce bias [2]- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summary_judgment
Jury nullification in the United States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unit...
"In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify. However, in Dougherty the then-chief judge David L. Bazelon authored a dissenting in part opinion, arguing that the jury should be instructed about their power to render the verdict according to their conscience if the law was unjust. He wrote that refusal to allow the jury to be instructed constitutes a 'deliberate lack of candor'. It has been argued that the denial of jury nullification requests negates much of the point of self-representation."
Both ask the jury to vote not guilty despite the legal fact of guilt, but the reasoning is different. Public interest defense says "yes, this was illegal, but morally necessary given the particular details of this case". Jury nullification is more "yes, this was illegal, but it shouldn't be" in my mind.
A public interest defense is one that argues that a public interest exception, included in a law, applies. In jurisdictions where a public interest defense is possible, i.e. Canada, it applies only to laws which include it as a public interest exception (in Canada, it would be the Security of Information Act of 2001). If a defense argues that a murder was okay because it was in the public interest, that wouldn't be a public interest defense, because the laws against murder don't include a public interest exception. Arguing that such an exception should be made by the jury, rather than that such an exception in the law applies to your case, is a straightforward argument for jury nullification.
In the US, I'm not aware of any laws that include a public interest exception, so a public interest defense would not be possible--appeals to the jury to find someone not guilty because their crime was in the public interest would be appeals for jury nullification.
There are a few defenses that work on these sorts of exceptions which only apply to specific laws. For example, truth is a defense against a libel charge but not against a HIPAA violation charge, and self defense is a defense against a murder charge but not against a robbery charge.
If I was a jury (but keeping in mind I am not even a US national), a fair sentencing would be to recognise him as guilty but to sentence him to a short term / time served.
There were many ways in which he could have blown a whistle without releasing wholesale everything he could find on the internal network to some foreign newspapers.
In the US, the judge decides the sentence and cannot sentence him to less than a minimum. For example, if convicted (by the jury) of treason, the law states that he "shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000", and the judge cannot impose a sentence less than that.
Where did OP suggest that? Jury nullification is specifically a case by case judgement, not a broad statement.
Jury nullification (US) or a perverse verdict (UK) generally occurs when members of a criminal trial jury believe that a defendant is guilty, but choose to acquit him anyway because the jurors also believe that the law itself is unjust,that the prosecutor has misapplied the law in the defendant's case,or that the potential punishment for breaking the law is too harsh.
I don't think the law is unjust or misapplied, just that the sentence should give him credit for the public interest aspect of the revelations.