re: Jessica Chambers jury says Not Guilty, but 7 say Guilty on Poll. Chaos in the courtroom

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Maybe. Maybe not. You never know how these things will go. I was on a murder jury in Louisiana. We had one juror who, although he believed the defendant was guilty, refused to vote guilty of murder 1 because it would open up the possibility of the death penalty. We went two days working on this guy, 11 against 1, and he wouldn't budge. Finally, in order to get out of there, we all agreed on second degree murder to keep the state from having to retry the case. The lone juror agreed to that. The guy got life w/o parole.

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I can see that. We had a similar situation where some jurors had issues with what "Manslaughter" really means with all the "heat of passion" stuff.

Since LA doesn't have a unanimous requirement for 2nd degree murder, we didn't have to work on them at all. (1st degree/Death penalty wasn't an option).

If unanimous had been the requirement I would have stayed there for hours.