Juror Unanimity

Professor Colb of Cornell Law School has an interesting article in FindLaw about juror unanimity and why the Supreme Court needs to clear up these muddy waters.

Ten Angry Men?: Why The Supreme Court Should Take a Jury Unanimity Case

In 2005, an Oregon jury convicted Scott David Bowen of eight counts of raping, sodomizing, and sexually abusing his teenage daughter. The verdict was not, however, unanimous but consisted of a majority vote of 10-2 – a breakdown that, in Oregon, suffices for conviction of crimes other than first-degree murder.

In his petition for Supreme Court review, Bowen contends that the Sixth Amendment jury trial right requires a unanimous jury for conviction of any serious criminal offense. Bowen thereby asks the Supreme Court to reconsider and overrule its 1972 decision in Apodaca v. Oregon, which upheld the split-verdict approach challenged here.

In this column, I will examine some practical implications of requiring unanimity for conviction (as all but two states currently do) rather than requiring something short of that, as Oregon and Louisiana do...

(to continue reading go here).

Comments

[Greg Jones]

If I remember correctly, the very ancient English practice was to add enough people to a split jury to gain a majority of twelve. For example, if the vote were split 10-2, four (or maybe 12) more jurors would have been added, hoping for a 14-2 result (or one of at least 18-6), regarded as good enough. So, very anciently, unanimity was sufficient for a verdict, but, in its absence, a big enough majority to satsify society that the correct result had been reached would do the trick.