this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2024
382 points (99.5% liked)

Wikipedia

1679 readers
253 users here now

A place to share interesting articles from Wikipedia.

Rules:

Recommended:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] IDKWhatUsernametoPutHereLolol@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Actually, you kinda need to convince your fellow jurors.

Hung jury is a mistrial. Mistrial means the prosecution can try again. (Double Jeopardy doesn't apply to mistrials) If you were the only one who voted not-guilty, chances are, the next jury will vote unanimously guilty.

Its very easy to get kicked off jury before deliberations, so what you wanna do is: After deliberations begin, try to covertly nudge your fellow jurors. For example, if the suspect did not say anything that's a confession, say "Are y'all sure this is the guy, I feel like he's been set up." Make excuses on why he might not be the perpetrator.

Only when you are sure that you don't have a unanimous "not-guilty" then try to say things like: "But should we really convict this guy when the CEO that died was a horrible person?" Just try not to say "jury nullification", keep making excuses on why you are voting "not-guilty".

If you manage to convince your fellow jurors to all vote "not-guilty" then the suspect is free. Otherwise, it just get tried again and its another roll of dice on the next jury.

[–] atomicorange@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

Ideally, yes, convince your fellow jurors. But if you can’t… a mistrial is still good. A new trial means a chance to change strategy with more information. Witnesses forget things, start changing up their stories. And there’s a chance the state will not retry - trials are expensive and time consuming, and a successful prosecution becomes less likely with each mistrial.

If you want to vote not guilty, you can. For whatever reason you choose.