I've been foreperson on a couple of juries, one criminal, one civil.

In my state, jury decisions must be unanimous. Criminal trials require "beyond a reasonable doubt", and civil trails require "with a preponderance of evidence".

One of the interesting things about being on a jury is that jury members are forbidden to discuss anything about the trial during the trial and only talk about it when they are in deliberations.

The jury will get very specific instructions from the judge as to the specific legal requirements for finding guilt, and the jury will spend a lot of time discussing what those mean. If they have questions, they can ask the judge for clarification.

For criminal cases, it's difficult to convict because of the high standard. The case I was on was fairly easy as the prosecution witnesses were not deemed to be credible.

Our civil case was a bit easier to come to agreement on because a) it's not about putting somebody in jail and b) the jury gets to decide the monetary awards, which gives them a lot of flexibility. In the civil case I did 11 of us converged quickly but we had one holdout - we were able to reach an agreement by changing the award structure so that the person who won didn't get much in the way of damages.