Submitted by appa-ate-momo t3_zz823l in explainlikeimfive
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nstickels t1_j2a3wh7 wrote
This right here. Imagine you are on jury duty with 11 other people and you are sequestered, meaning you are not allowed contact to the outside world, you are not allowed to go to work, you aren’t allowed to see your family or friends. And for all of this, you are making a whole $20 per day. These 11 other people all agree the person is guilty, but you don’t agree. They all want to leave. You want to leave. You are the only reason they can’t leave.
So first they are probably going to ask you why you don’t agree. Then you will need to layout why. The others will all go over your reasons and for each reason, try to explain why they disagree. This process will repeat all day every day until you agree with them. Yes, you could hold out for several days to weeks and eventually have it declared a hung jury. In most cases though, instead of having your every thought picked apart and analyzed over and over all day for days on end, you will end up agreeing just to make it stop.
GovernorSan t1_j2axwr3 wrote
Sounds like 12 Angry Men was a lot closer to reality than one might think, except the one guy who thought he was innocent managed to convince the other 11 who voted guilty.
Frix t1_j2fdskt wrote
It's a nice movie, but not at all realistic with how a jury actually works.
Juror number 12 broke the law on multiple occasions.
jpalumbos t1_j2c9hxp wrote
Peer pressure, yes, but also gullibility.
I was on a jury for a DWI case. Our initial vote was a 50/50 split. Evidence leaned toward a guilty verdict, but b/c the defendant refused a breath-test, not conclusive. Other tests were administered (like follow-the-finger and walk-a-straight-line), and their techniques were explained.
One juror, a teacher named Terry, was very loquacious and also convincing. He seemed to get stuck on a technical aspect of one of the tests, but also seemed to be overly enthusiastic about this. He said, "I just don't think the prosecutor proved his case." By the end of the 1st day, he had (singularly) convinced all but one of us to vote 'Not-Guilty'.
I'm nowhere near as vocal as Terry, but to me, the evidence we had indicated 'Guilty', and Terry's logic wasn't making sense. I'm not eloquent enough to have changed others' minds, but I wasn't buying Terry's arguments, either, and he knew this. We adjourned for the day.
When we resumed the next morning, Terry started off by saying, "I was thinking about it overnight, and I think the prosecutor proved his case, after all." Within just a few minutes, we had a unanimous 'Guilty' verdict.
Taira_Mai t1_j2c4c7x wrote
>Part of that is also that prosecutors are pretty good at identifying and excluding potential jurors who are likely to hold out for ideological reasons.
Defense attorneys as well - those who argue a lot of cases know how to spot the person who could be a thorn in their side.
As the old law school joke goes "If you have the law on your side, hammer the judge, if the facts are on your side, hammer the jury, if you have neither, hammer on the table!"
LochFarquar t1_j2dz56o wrote
Yeah, no argument on that, although I think there are more "law and order" types than criminal justice skeptics in a typical jury pool.
greatdrams23 t1_j2d7n4i wrote
But didn't they have peer pressure in the past?
LochFarquar t1_j2dys3x wrote
Yes. I'm not claiming this is new.
phiwong t1_j2a0ozd wrote
Because it is a very controlled situation. Juries are instructed on what the law says and how it is to be interpreted, and are presented with facts relevant to the case. They aren't supposed to make their decisions based on feelings, guts, ideology, intuition, attractiveness etc.
In many cases, the legally relevant facts, when presented clearly and interpreted according to the law, are very clear. There are, of course, notable exceptions.
exponentials t1_j2aacgm wrote
In criminal cases, the hung jury rate is 8% to 10%. In closed jury room discussions, some are willing to compromise, but jurors will often succumb to peer pressure and reach a unanimous verdict rather than risking a mistrial by not coming to a collective decision. There's an immense pressure on jurors to conform to the majority decision which places a reliance on the presumption that the other jurors know better than the individual. Sucks, but a reality.
deep_sea2 t1_j2a11lf wrote
Something like 95% of all jury trials result in some conviction, and the majority of criminal cases never make to trial. If a case is in trial, there is a more than likely chance that the case is that solid, that is not that hard to get all jury members to agree.
LochFarquar t1_j2a272v wrote
> If a case is in trial, there is a more than likely chance that the case is that solid...
I'm not sure this is true. Open and shut cases tend to plead out. A primary reason a case goes to trial is that the defendant won't take a plea deal because they have a strong case for innocence.
Ansuz07 t1_j2a30kz wrote
Eh, not really. As the original commenter said, ~94% of cases brought to trail still result in guilty verdicts.
However, ~72% of cases brought to trial don't get convictions on every charge, just some of the charges. It's possible that the defendant may feel that the jury will convict them of a lesser charge than the plea offering the prosecution puts on the table.
deep_sea2 t1_j2a2d6m wrote
Still, it's a 95% chance of a guilty verdict.
Weaker cases tend to go the route of the plea as the state tends to offer reduces charges in hopes to avoid chancing it at trial. Also, if there is any weakness in the case, the judge might throw out the case or the state might drop it before it ever reaches trial.
LochFarquar t1_j2a8c6u wrote
>Still, it's a 95% chance of a guilty verdict.
We've had many people let off of death row from DNA evidence exonerating them. These are the cases that are supposed to be the most scrutinized and the cases where the system is the most certain. And DNA exonerations are only a subset of the people who are actually innocent and on death row -- it would be foolish to think that DNA has caught all of the actual innocence cases.
Why do we have so many exonerations? Because trials are a highly imperfect tool of determining guilt -- police and prosecutors have vastly more resources than public defenders, people tend to trust the system (I think many people agree with your view that prosecutors only bring cases to trial when they're sure), the guy in the jumpsuit and cuffs looks guilty, jurors have a view that an innocent person would testify but defendants almost never testify based on how the rules of evidence work, etc.
If I say, "many defendants who insist on going to trial do so because they are innocent," and your response is "but they're almost all convicted." That only disproves my point if we assume that all convictions are correct, and I don't make that assumption.
deep_sea2 t1_j2ahcu4 wrote
> many defendants who insist on going to trial do so because they are innocent,"
I don't necessarily disagree with that. However, if a person is truly innocent, they have evidence to back that up, and fights all the way in every pre trial option available, there is good chance that it won't go to trial. The state does not like to lose, so they don't take cases to trial that they don't think they can win.
What I am saying is that innocent people rarely go on trial. They don't go on trial because if their evidence is good, it won't make it to trial. The legal work exists in the pre-trial. The main reason innocent people go to jail is because they can't afford good legal representation. They can't afford the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to mount a legal defense. Since they can't afford it, they typically plead out early.
But, sticking to OPs question, juries are rarely hung because of the state is willing to go to trial, they have a dynamite case (most of the time). The state might be wrong, but they appear be right, and so the decision is rather easy for the jury.
flamableozone t1_j2bhfpc wrote
As a percentage, maybe it's rare, but people who are innocent frequently go to trial - people who are innocent frequently even confess in a plea deal. The idea that innocence will produce evidence is just false.
Nice_Sun_7018 t1_j2bxavg wrote
The one trial I ever sat on a jury for, the crime was obvious and the defendant definitely did it. There was video footage in addition to the usual evidence. There was no reasonable doubt from a juror’s perspective. We had a fantastic foreman so we did our due diligence in talking over the evidence, but there were no holdouts. It took a lot longer to discuss the sentence than it did whether or not he was guilty.
Triabolical_ t1_j2bzojl wrote
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.
A_Garbage_Truck t1_j2a0eyj wrote
that's the whole point they are there ot begin with they are required to study the facts and arguments presented and reach their own conclusions.
a conclusion of " i dont know" is not acceptable since the system relies on the assumption of innonence any other verdict other than guilty resulting in the defendant walking.
for this purpose, in the cases where its required the jury cna take as long as it is necessary but they must reach a unanimous conclusion.this cna evne mean they are arguing among themselves(but no coercing) in order ot sway the other memebers ot their field.
appa-ate-momo OP t1_j2a0min wrote
But how do juries so consistently avoid the problem of one random person just not being convinced of guilt while everyone else is sure the crime was committed?
Ansuz07 t1_j2a149x wrote
It is primarily due to the fact that prosecutors have broad discretion in what cases get brought to trial - they rarely bring cases where guilt is in question, as acquittals look bad on their record. In cases where a guilty verdict may be questionable, they will plead the person down on lesser charges or simply not bring it to trial at all.
For this reason, upwards of 94% of cases brought to trial result in convictions on some or all charges - the prosecutors simply don't press the other cases.
There is also an extensive jury selection process pre-trial, where the prosecution can exclude jurors they feel would be unable to render a fair decision after viewing all of the evidence.
phadrus56 t1_j2a0wj0 wrote
If the judge feels they should be able to reach a unanimous decision he will send them back to deliberate more.
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[deleted] t1_j2clfcm wrote
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boytoy421 t1_j2cvctp wrote
In addition to all the reasons listed above: usually by the time a case goes to trial if it hasn't been plead out or dismissed the DA has the guy dead to rights.
Like I remember one where I was a witness where the guy had called in prank bomb threats to avoid bunch of schools (i was there to testify that we'd had to evacuate the building) and like they had the guy's cell records, 3 people who could ID his voice, and a guy who rolled on him.
At the end of the day the DA struck a deal on lesser charges just to avoid a trial
[deleted] t1_j2e60df wrote
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[deleted] t1_j2els31 wrote
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[deleted] t1_j2b0lwv wrote
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appa-ate-momo OP t1_j2b0rnm wrote
Do you mean convict or acquit? Or can a judge just say ‘you’re stuck here until you say guilty’
[deleted] t1_j2emjdr wrote
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LochFarquar t1_j2a0z9l wrote
Peer pressure. We have pretty good anecdotal evidence that when there's one or two holdouts that they will give in and go with the majority. Part of that is also that prosecutors are pretty good at identifying and excluding potential jurors who are likely to hold out for ideological reasons.