The Daniel Penny trial, plus multiple viewings of “12 Angry Men” has me wondering…
Suppose you’re on a jury and you are the holdout. You’re the only member keeping the group from deciding a verdict. How difficult is that situation, personally?
It’s very easy for me, sitting in my living room, to say, “If I felt strongly about it, I wouldn’t cave to pressure from other people who just want to get out of there.” But it surely isn’t that simple. That’s got to be a very troubling spot to find yourself in and pressure can be exerted not only by the other jury members, but also the judge who wants them to deliver a verdict.
Have any Dopers been in something like this scenario? I’ve never been called for jury duty.
I’ve been on a hung jury, but not as a holdout (I was foreman). We went over the judge’s instructions and the presented evidence several times but we could not reach a consensus. Continuing discussion would not change that. We are required to follow the evidence as presented by the attorneys, and the judge’s instructions, but we’re not required to reach consensus.
imagine you’re in an endless meeting in a windowless room. You would rather be anywhere else in the world. If you’re a team player then you get to leave. If not, you have to stay there indefinitely, taking an occasional break for the judge to lecture you about the importance of your responsibilities.
If you’re a holdout, is justice enough of an incentive to keep you in that meeting indefinitely? If you’re with the decided majority, would you not do to a person who was keeping you stuck there?
I was on a 2-day jury and the anger at the holdout was pretty palpable. I can’t imagine what it would be for a jury that had been empaneled for weeks or months.
One of my co-workers was on a jury sorta like that. After much discussion and wrangling there were two hold-outs.
He explained that he was single, lived in an apartment, had zero responsibilities, and with his particular job, his employer would pay his full wage for the next 20 years if need be. With no adverse effect on his career progression or coworkers. He went on to say that much of his job consists of sitting motionless in a chair doing almost nothing for hours at a time.
The he turned his chair, faced the wall, folded his arms, and stopped talking. The holdouts folded a few minutes later.
I’m not sure he did a good thing; but I am sure he did an effective thing.
Related question: How long is the minimum time requirement before a jury can declare itself hung? What if, just 30 minutes into deliberations, they told the judge, “We’re a hung jury, please dismiss us?”
There is no fixed standard. Jurors have to say that there is no reasonable chance they’ll ever resolve their deadlock. Judges typically send them back to “keep trying” at least once, and sometimes more. It’s up to the judge to try to get a feel for it and make the call.
ETA: The judge will also make clear that although everyone wants them to work together to try to reach a verdict, jurors should not abandon their sincere beliefs.
This was my experience as well. After our first indication we were not going to reach a consensus he sent back a note telling us to keep trying. I suppose each judge has their own standard as to how long it should take.
Each case is different. So it’s not the judge’s standard really, it’s trying to read the jury and get a feel for how hard they’ve tried and whether more time would make a difference. They consider things like the length and complexity of the trial, and the demeanor of the jurors. I’d say about half the time sending them back works, and half the time they remain hung.
I’d just like to take this opportunity to point that that as much as it is celebrated, the film 12 Angry Men has some of the most egregious jury tampering outside of the even more abominable Runaway Jury. Juror #8 (played by Henry Fonda) introduces a new theory of the particulars of the purported crime, casts doubt on the testimony of a witness on the basis of observations outside of what questioning under oath established, and then went out during a break to acquire ‘evidence’ (a weapon purportedly similar to the one used in the crime but never presented to the court, such that the prosecution and defense counsel could not ascertain its applicability and the judge could not rule on admissibility) in order to ‘prove’ reasonable doubt. While jurors are allowed and expected to bring their own particular experience and knowledge into deliberations, #8 took exceptional and extraordinary steps outside of the normal process of deliberation to influence members of the jury to ignore arguments and evidence presented in court, and had this been known to the prosecution they almost certainly could have argued for a mistrial.
That film is the anti-My Cousin Vinny, which in contrast demonstrates the necessity of suspects to invoke their right to remain silent, the principle of disclosure of the prosecution’s evidence, the value of understanding legal procedure, how questioning the assumptions and details of eyewitness statements can discredit unreliable testimony, and the need for rigorous voir dire to establish the credentials of expert witnesses in the specific areas of technical knowledge applicable to interpreting the evidence at hand. And also, of course, how to get your $200 from some haysack idiot who won’t pay up after looking a pool game to Marisa Tomei.
Every aspiring lawyer should watch My Cousin Vinny. No one should watch 12 Angry Men except as an example of how one caitiff can sidetrack a jury with fake evidence and irrelevant theorizing.
Impressive. That word (meaning a contemptible or cowardly person) is older than the word jury itself, at least in English.
A series of experiments conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s demonstrated how powerful group pressure was. The subjects were asked simple questions like “which line is the longest?” Unknown to the subjects the rest of the group were ringers, told to give incorrect answers and stick to them. Those subjects were pressed to rethink their correct answers. Asch found that it was difficult for them to hold out even when obviously right. Later studies showed that having even a single extra person disagree with the group made it much easier to remain a holdout.
Of course, the results were not universal. Some people did stand their ground, with different percentages doing so in various studies with variant processes. But the basic notion of social influence on opinion holds up in multiple studies and spawned a whole branch of research that has been busy looking at the group pressures found on the internet and in political and religious settings. Since a much larger percentage succumbs rather than holds out, the society we live in has been molded by those pressures.
That happened to me once, too. And we did reach a verdict later that day. That was the only time somebody said they were not going to change their mind, but did. All the other times, discussion made us reach concensus.
Irrespective of whether the Fonda character’s actions were permissible or not, I’ve always liked that 12 Angry Men ends ambiguously. We never know if they made the “right” decision. I suspect the kid DID commit the killing and the jury talked themselves out of that conclusion.
Apart from Fonda’s character, the old guy also introduced an argument I’ve always found specious. He brings up that the lady witness probably wore glasses. Then the E.G. Marshall character concurs and says, “Nobody wears glasses to bed.”. Well, maybe she was reading in bed and nodded off with her glasses on. Then woke up and witnessed… something. Or as the angry juror said, maybe she was farsighted.
Having never been on a jury, I don’t know how I react to that. Is it introducing “reasonable doubt”? Dunno. Either way, I don’t really expect any movie to teach me about reality. So I am curious what actually happened in the Penny jury room.
To expand on this, there is what’s known as the Allen charge, given to put pressure on the jury to git 'er done. The whole article is well worth reading.
I was a holdout, but not a lone holdout. The charges were (IIRC) one misdemeanor charge and a felony charge. It was a she-said/he-did-not-testify case, with no witnesses or hard evidence on the felony. The prosecution had put on a their case, the defense chipped away at the case, but had not put on a defense case.
We got in the jury room and I had already decided that the prosecution’s felony case didn’t rise above my reasonable doubt. After some chit chat, we voted to see where we were. 11-1 for guilty on the misdemeanor (I wasn’t the holdout), 10-2 for guilty on the felony (I was one of the holdouts). The misdemeanor was the only part of the prosecutions that had objective evidence, so I persuaded the holdout by pointing out the judge’s instructions on the law and the hard evidence we’d seen. This had a dual use- it got the misdemeanor charge out of the way and it positioned me as a “reasonable guy”. I then proceeded to argue and introduce my understanding of the evidence until we stood 8-4 on the second day. With some other jurors teetering, I then suggested we let the judge know we were hung on the charge. I had a gut feeling that the judge did not expect the case to go past the weekend (we had gone into deliberations on a Thursday morning and a “win” on the misdemeanor might quiet any arguments from the prosecution to keep the deliberations going.
And that’s what happened. Convicted on the misdemeanor, hung on the felony, which was fine by me. The funny thing was that while we were waiting to see if the judge would accept the jury as hung, the lone holdout on the misdemeanor (and my fellow initial holdout on the felony) revealed that his reason for voting not guilty across the board was essentially (warning, offensive phrase) “bitches be crazy” and he would have held out forever, there was no rational basis to his holdout but he had this bedrock view of the world that wasn’t going to be shaken.
I seem to remember that, when Jodi Arias was found guilty of first degree murder, she avoided the death penalty because one juror would not approve it. The sentence then reverted to life without parole. So, juries can be “hung” in the sentencing phase as well, but the verdict still stands as ruled?
I was involved in a civil case that resulted in a hung jury because of a lone holdout. It involved a motorcyclist who was injured when he crossed an intersection which was under construction and not properly lit or marked; the street on one side of the intersection had not yet been paved and he drove into the unpaved surface and lost control of his motorcycle. He was suing the construction company for his injuries.
Part of the jury questioning from both sides included their attitude toward motorcyclists. The construction company’s lawyer had one dismissed because he said that he regularly rode a motorcycle, and the plaintiff’s attorney dismissed several who admitted that they didn’t think motorcycles were safe.
When both sides had closed their cases and we went in to deliberate there was a lot of discussion about whether the construction company had taken proper precautions to protect drivers at night, and whether the motorcyclist could have been aware of the road conditions. Eventually we were all agreed that the construction company was at fault.
Except for one person who loudly and insistently refused to go along because “motorcycles aren’t safe” and there was no way we were going to be able to convince him that the plaintiff was entitled to anything. He had obviously seen that if he had admitted this during voir dire he wouldn’t have been allowed on the jury. We reported that we were unable to reach a decision and were sent back twice by the judge before we were finally declared a hung jury.