Is it bad that a jury’s decision must be unanimous? Doesn’t this often have negative consequences, if for example 11 people think one thing and just 1 disagrees?

20 comments

  2. Any guilty verdict must be decided beyond a reasonable doubt if one is holding out that shows there to be a reasonable doubt. It’s not perfect but in the same vein if a jury is hung it doesn’t acquit the accused but a new jury must be found.

  4. Better to let a guilty man go free than to imprison an innocent man.

    In other words, yes, having a hung jury has negative consequences but the consequences of a wrong guilty verdict are worse. Wrong verdicts aren’t eliminated by requiring specific margins in a jury, but it doesn’t hurt.

  5. Serving on a jury will show you that probably 30% of people will vote to convict because the prosecutor said they did it. My first jury it was me and a social studies teacher against everyone else. The charge was he planned to distribute. He had what was described as enough crack to get high four or five times, and the police thought he wanted to sell it. That was the states evidence that he was dealing.

    I didn’t really need to be there, because no one was moving the social studies teacher to vote to convict.

    But if we went with eleven votes, just one of us being removed would have let them convict a man because the police “thought he was going to do it”.

  6. Perfectly fine with it. As others pointed out, when you are facing the resources of the government, justice requires pretty strong safeguards for the defendant. And if anyone is interested in doing some extra reading on it, look up Ramos v. Louisiana. It’s a 2020 SCOTUS decision that mandated that all jury decisions must be unanimous. Prior to that, Oregon and Louisiana permitted convictions in some cases with only ten out of twelve votes.

  7. Considering all that the government has in it’s favor, the least they can do is get a unanimous jury verdict. Even with requiring a unanimous verdict, the vast majority of jury trials are won by the government.

    That said i have many problems with the jury system we have, the unanimous part isn’t one of it though.

    As an interesting aside, some people *do* choose a bench trial where it’s just the judge without the jury.

  8. That’s by design. It’s supposed to be hard to convict — the onus in on the government to prove its case. If you don’t get a unanimous verdict, the government has the option of re-trying the case in front of a new jury or letting the matter drop.

  10. As a lawyer, I would prefer that a verdict only be unanimous to convict. If half a jury is saying not guilty either half the jury is unreasonable or half are ignoring reasonable doubt. Hung juries should be an acquittal

  12. The legal system should always be biased in favor of the defendant.

    David Camm. An Indiana man accused of murdering his family.

    The state abused him, framed him, made up evidence, destroyed evidence proving his innocence, compromised evidence that showed someone else that wasn’t him was the killer, allowed relatives of the killer to interfere with evidence linking the true killer to the case, changed their story hundreds of times whenever Camm’s defense team would tear down and slaughter their blatantly untrue tall tales of Camm, slandered and libeled him, accusing him of molesting his daughter with no evidence, in order to taint a jury against him.

    People like David Camm are the reason why the legal system ought to biased in favor of the defendant. It took three trials of state-sanctioned lies, slander, libel, defamation and framing for a jury to finally see through Indiana’s horseshit and declare him not guilty of all charges, and on the third and final trial, the state even ordered the jury to find him guilty in spite of the lack of evidence to show that he was even present during the murders or even had a vague idea of the existence of the real killer prior to the murders.

    A single individual should be able to ruin an entire prosecution’s case.

  13. Look up what happened to Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter if you want to know why the US requires a jury verdict to be unanimous. It’s… pretty famous. If you want the cliff notes version, just look up the song with the name Hurricane. He was convicted of murder and spent 21 years of his life in prison and he very much did not commit the crime. Eventually got out but it took him basically learning the legal system really intimately to figure out how to get out…

    The idea behind the justice system in the United States is that the burden of proof is on the prosecution. The system is designed to have the possibility of occasionally letting people who did do the thing they are accused of free to try and minimize the number of times people are wrongfully convicted. I’m an American citizen and I am glad it’s designed this way because I would really prefer the occasional guilty person go free than have a bunch of innocent people rotting in prison when they should never have been convicted.

  14. Jury nullification is real and a good thing and people should Google it before serving on a jury

  15. Ive thought about this and I never understood why we don’t have a system where 10 out of 12 jurors are needed to convict. Seems like it would be the best of all worlds. Convincing 10 jurors is still a very high bar to clear, and it would offer protection from a theoretical unjustified dissenter.

  16. If it’s my ass on the line I want every advantage I can get. I’d extend that same benefit to you.

  17. I don’t think it’s bad. It forces both sides in a case to make sure all the evidence is there and show that they have a strong case one way or another. If we’re sending someone to prison or forcing them to pay millions of dollars, the case better be air tight.

  18. If you’re having a jury trial, your life is not on track and you could be looking at serious time in prison, or worse, hell yes it better be all 12

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