12 Angry Men with Henry Fonda highlighted this problem in 1957. Nothing has particularly changed in the intervening years. Judges routinely use the Allen Charge to send deadlocked juries back to try again.
If you haven’t seen the movie, imagine being trapped in a bitter straight dope thread. Endlessly arguing and arguing. You can’t stop until the Judge says so. Even worse, someone’s life is at stake. Your vote may be the only thing keeping the defendant out of prison. Or your vote may be the only thing keeping the defendant from being exonerated.
I can’t help but wonder how many people “give up” and change their vote? They want to go home. They are sick of belittled for their position. It’s easier to bow to peer pressure.
I understand it’s worth sending the jury back one time to continue the debate.
Isn’t there a point where the defendant’s right to a fair trial may be at risk? Can a jury decision be appealed because it was deadlocked for days?
This has come up during the Cosby trial. No one knows which way the jury is deadlocked. I can easily imagine how heated it must be inside that jury room. 52 hours arguing.
“… or an announcement that further effort would be hopeless.”
That means the jury has the means to stop their deliberations. So if they continue, it is voluntary. Well, voluntary for the whole group. I am sure there are some individual jurors who have been ready to give up two days ago.
I’d more readily bow to peer pressure to change my vote to not guilty. I wouldn’t be happy about it, but 11 other frustrated people can be daunting.
I wouldn’t send somebody to prison because of peer pressure. If I’m convinced somebody is innocent then hell will freeze over before I get coereced into voting guilty.
I guess there are situations that debate legitimately changes opinions within the jury.
This is one of the best examples of how theory and practice do not always agree.
Imagine if you’re on a jury, and after a couple full, long days of argument, you send a message to the judge that you’re deadlocked.
But, wait–what is this? The judge replies, in effect, “You don’t really mean that. You need to keep liberating for a couple more days.”
Now I’m sure that a jury that actually knew its rights and its powers could stand up to the judge; but most people don’t know how powerful a jury really is.
Anecdote once told to me by a fellow pilot who worked the long haul trans-oceanic flights. I’m not embellishing, but I have no idea how much he may have been.He’d been selected for a jury hearing a case about a prisoner who was charged with assaulting a medical worker at the prison. In his view the defendant was guilty. Somebody on the jury was convinced that the guards had excessively mistreated the prisoner getting him off the medical worker and the government had thereby forfeited its moral right to prosecute. In fact the juror wanted the guards brought up on assault charges. The rest of the jurors were mixed but leaning guilty.
After the first quicky poll around the table established this impasse, my friend made his speech:
“I vote the defendant is guilty. I’m not changing my mind. I’m union labor; my employer will pay my full salary forever with no consequences to me. While we’re here there’s no work piling up at my job waiting for me to get back. Do you know what I do for a living? I sit in a chair for 8 hours at a crack doing nothing but watching the paint dry. I’m very, very good at it. I will sit here for a year if necessary, and so will all of you choosing ‘not guilty’.”
With that he leaned back and folded his hands in his lap.
The rest of the folks continued to bicker & discuss. He just sat there watching the opposite wall. Approaching the end of the normal workday the last “not guilty” voter looked over at him, who hadn’t moved a bit in the last 4 hours, and changed their vote.Whether you (or I) agree or disagree with this guy’s tactics, they work(ed). It’s clear that people do change their vote for peer pressure or for personal convenience.
It has been declared a mistrial. The jury deliberated for an hour on Saturday, and told the judge they’ve had enough. As I said, the jury has the means to stop their deliberations. They are not locked in there forever.
Wonder if the pro/con breakdown in the jury will be revealed at some point.
I’m the type of person that can’t be ‘convinced’ by others. I’ll do my analysis of how likely I think it is that the defendant committed the crime, or in a civil case, the relative blame between parties. Once I do that analysis, that’s it. I’m not going to change my vote. I don’t give a shit how long it takes - I’m not going to send someone to prison, or let a definitely guilty person free just so I can personally get out of jury duty. I’m perfectly willing to explain my reasoning to others, but if they cannot find any glaring faults in it (or if I use math to find the series probability, any arithmetic errors), I won’t change my vote.
I wonder how the system handles jurors like me, if they don’t kick me before trial. If I tell the other members I’m not budging, and am not willing to budge - emotional arguments aren’t going to sway me - can we just have the mistrial day 1, if there are intractable members of the jury pool on day 1?
As for the Cosby case, dunno. He probably is in fact a serial rapist that drugs women, but eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, and no physical evidence was presented during this trial. Without having seen the complete evidence, I’d probably go with acquittal. Yes, I know he’s guilty, but the state presenting a single eyewitness who has been inconsistent in her story, almost certainly consented to sexual activity with Cosby (just not drugged sex I guess…at least not with *those *particular drugs)…yeah, that’s not enough.
Most decisions can be appealed as a matter of course, regardless of the jury. From what I’ve read and seen, there are lots of details, and some cases can’t be appealed.
As for the length of deliberation being used as a REASON to appeal, I’ve not heard that used.
I don't see any rational way that the length of deliberation could be found to have caused an unfair decision, from a legal standpoint. Had such ever been the case (i.e. a legal decision to overturn a jury conviction on the grounds of excess deliberation time alone), it would have caused all following trials to have jury deliberations put on a time limit or some such.
So the answer is NO, even though I do understand the various examples, and how it might seem to be somehow just. The thing is, legal reasoning in such things is a lot more complicated and subtle than the surface concerns mentioned here recognize.
So my answer is both a firm no, and in addition, a firm statement that it SHOULD remain a firm no.
Actually, a followup question would be : would the retrial be done with the same judge?
This is a significant issue here, because in this particular case, the only significant evidence against Cosby is his own words, given in a situation where the man was told that he had immunity to prosecution.
The prosecutor who granted the immunity has come out and confirmed this. Apparently, this immunity deal might not have been done using the right mechanism, but the state must honor such deals, or the whole system of compelled testimony when immunity is granted falls apart.
This is a massive issue, and I’m wondering if a different judge might grant a motion to dismiss the deposition as evidence. Without that evidence, the retrial would go nowhere.
Like I said above, I know he’s probably a serial rapist who roofies women. But, if the state prosecutors can’t be forced to honor a deal that they made, we don’t really have rule of law. Rule of law means, among other things, you sometimes have to let people you know are guilty go free because to do otherwise would be an injustice.
I agree with the OP; it seems that the effect of extended debate is simply to cause a deadlocked jury to break in favor of the majority, whatever the majority is. If the majority favors Guilty, then the straggling holdouts will succumb to peer pressure and go Guilty as well, just to not look bad. Ditto for Not Guilty.
:dubious: I like the range of options there. I am either on the side of good, trying to get him out of prison. Or I am on the side of evil, and risk having the defendant be exonerated? Why can’t I be at risk of having a murderer walking the streets?
The other jurors should have reported your friend’s behavior to the judge. If a juror refuses to deliberate, he can be replaced by an alternate juror, or have a mistrial declared.
While there is no way of ever truly knowing, I bet this happens way more than most people realize. Civic duty gets sort of romanticized not unlike patriotism, in that many people have this fictional idea of it because (and as long as) it’s this vague, disconnected concept. It’s easy to believe in jury duty if you are never called upon to serve.
The fact that so many people try so hard to get out of it pretty well proves that many must fail at their efforts.
So now you’ve got somebody empaneled who positively doesn’t want to be there. They’re not suddenly going to grow a civic conscience. Or at least not all of them will.
I thought it was kind of a dick move too. OTOH, there was the other juror who was ready to ignore 100% of the evidence merely to spite the government. Who’s really the problem child?
See also ref the post #7 from SamuelA. His mind would be incontrovertibly made up at the close of testimony. Or so he thinks now.
“Deliberation” IME is ideally, the process of jurors collectively uncovering areas where one or another juror missed a fact or misunderstood the law or is just playing their own game, not the one the rules require to be played. Once we all have the same facts we ought to mostly get to the same decision. OTOH, the only cases that go to trial are the murky ones where the facts are incomplete and contradictory and a lot hinges on who’s credible and why. Different jurors will rate different witnesses credibility differently.
If “deliberation” gets to salesmanship, you’re doing it wrong. Or having it done to you wrong.
I completely agree. I’d also say that most people called for jury duty probably don’t have the level of job security of the guy you mention. So given the fact, or assumption, that this guy is much like many other empaneled jurors, and it was only his job security that gave him the insulation to ‘stick to his guns’ like he did, I’d guess that changing or basing your verdict decision on “how will this end things fastest” determinations are not at all uncommon.
If you genuinely think he is guilty, then you are committing an injustice in letting him go free. You are denying a punishment for rape, and thus encouraging rape. I can’t even see any moral difference from doing that and my buddy confessing to me and me trying to help him get away with it.
Things are bad enough as it is, with people disbelieving rape victims all the time, and there often not being enough evidence for people to know the truth. We shouldn’t make things worse.
If you know he did it, vote guilty. Use the power the law has given you to make the world a better place.
Letting the guilty go free is ALWAYS an injustice. It can’t be anything else. Someone committed a crime without consequence. Victims were hurt, and they cannot get restitution. The person who committed the crime is not discouraged from committing it again, and someone who commits rape now knows the likelihood of getting in trouble is lower than before. Society is inherently worse off, and less just.
Furthermore, you can’t cite rule of law when you admit that, under rule of law, they did not grant immunity. If they didn’t use the proper legal mechanism, then, under the law, they are not restricted.
You can’t have it both ways. If you follow the law, you follow the whole of the law. If you, on the other hand, use the law as a tool to stop injustice, then you can’t let a guilty man go free as long as it is in within your power to stop him.
I don’t know he raped that specific woman. Which is what the trial was about. Given how many other women there were, most likely in fact he was guilty - but none of those women were presented as witnesses in court. It has happened before that there has been widespread hysteria about a supposed crime - with about this many witnesses - and it turns out to be bullshit. No one had any proof or would even give testimony in court worth a damn.
So no, I’d do my civic duty and consider the evidence presented and decide if the aggregate probability of guilt, given that evidence, is at least 99% probability of guilt. Since eyewitness testimony has only about 60% reliability (people lie, people are mistaken), if that’s all they are going to present, that isn’t enough. Cosby’s deposition statements aren’t enough either - they don’t specifically admit to the crime. Combined, maybe that raises it to 80% probability of guilt. I’d need to see the receipt for the sedatives and a blood test or some other non biased source of evidence to raise my confidence of guilt to the 99% threshold.
Irrational jurors - aka stupid people - tend to have these mental switches. They either “believe 100%” something or believe it 0%. I guess that’s what irrational thinking is like. So that’s why I wouldn’t be swayed by the average joe who doesn’t believe in uncertainty during deliberations.
If the prosecution can’t present those things, well, I guess the accused goes free. Oh well. Honestly there’s no point in punishing him now, nobody is going to accept a drink or pills from Bill Cosby at any point for the rest of his life. No young woman who is not willing to have sex with him is going to go into a room alone with him from now on. So this crime isn’t going to happen again, if he can even get it up these days. I see no purpose in making him rot in a cell, it doesn’t accomplish anything.