re: Unanimous Juries- How ya votin and why?

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Please elaborate.

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Two of them are constructed in order to most frequently get the correct answer. One of them is constructed to least frequently convict an innocent person. If you don't understand the distinction, you might want to get off TD and see if you can find a basic course in Civics on Youtube.

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Its supposed to be difficult to convict someone, and someone voting no tells me theres reasonable doubt. 12 angry men is a great story about that

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Right. Are we suggesting prosecutors in LA need help sending people to prison? In the incarceration capitol of the world?

No. Too easy to sway, or pay, one juror.

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Care to expound on your experience?

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Okay, but this is going to be a long story....

I sat on a jury trying an aggravated arson/attemtped murder case where the defendant set his elderly landlord on fire while the landlord was asleep in his bed.

The defendant was black. The jury was made up of 10 whites and 2 blacks, 10 men and 2 women. Both women were white. (You'll see the significance of this jury composition in a minute.)

The only eyewitness to the crime, the landlord, had died of natural causes between the time of the crime and the start of the trial. There was a delay of about 3 years between the crime and our trial. We had no idea why it took so long.

The evidence we had to go on was a taped confession by the defendant where he admitted he set the old man on fire because the landlord was evicting him for non-payment.

The defense called the defendant to testify and he swore that the only reason he confessed was because the police kept beating him in the interrogation room and wouldn't let him eat, drink water or sleep for almost 2 days.

The prosecution had the arresting detectives testify along with the police who made the arrest at the crime scene while the house was still burning. They found the defendant masturbating watching the house burn.

The detectives said they never touched the defendant and he didn't need to eat because he confessed immediately upon being questioned.

The vote was 10-2 to convict.

All the men, including the 2 black men, voted for conviction. Both white women said they felt sorry for the defendant because he had led a difficult life on the street and they believed him when he said the police beat him to get the confession.

After I read the verdict (the other jurors elected me foreman of the jury) and the judge polled all of us to have us say how we voted and the judge then dismissed the defendant from the room, the judge turned to us jurors and said, "Ladies and gentlemen, you have done your community a great service today. Let me tell you the rest of the story that couldn't be admitted into evidence in this trial."

He told us this was the third trial for this same crime, hence the three-year time delay before this trial started.

Both previous juries had convicted the defendant unanimously but those trials were thrown out on appeal due to "technicalities." The elderly landlord was still alive at those trials and testified that he woke up on fire in his bed and the defendant was standing over him masturbating and laughing.

The judge also told us the defendant had murdered two other persons, including his own infant daughter by his common-law wife, by burning them to death. But no witnesses would testify against the defendant because he told them if they testified against him he would escape from prison and burn them to death, too. He was a cold-bloodied killer who had zero regard for human life and he got off by seeing people burning to death.

So the police could not build a case to arrest him on the two previous murders with eye witnesses refusing to testify.

When the judge told us this both of the white women who voted not guilty started crying and wailing about how they had wanted to let a monster go free.

I was so pissed at both of those women that as we were leaving the courtroom I had to let them know how I felt about how they let their emotions outweigh the evidence. I wasn't very tactful about it.

The detectives who had testified were still in the room and heard my outburst toward the two women and both of them came up to all of us men who had voted guilty to thank us. They had been working for many years to get this killer off the street for good. (A month or so later I read in the paper the defendant was sentenced to 25 years in Angola.)

I came away knowing that a defendant gets every benefit of the doubt, even when the judge knows he is guilty.

10-2 is okay with me.

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and someone voting no tells me theres reasonable doubt

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Or it tells you there is a biased juror. I’ve been on a jury where the police caught the person in the act of armed robbery AND it was on video and there was still a juror refused to vote guilty. It should come to no surprise to you that they were the same race. The juror was tired of seeing “her people” go to jail and was open about it.

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How non-unanimous juries in criminal trials survive constitutional scrutiny is beyond me. The presence of 1 or 2 jurors out of 12 who vote not guilty seems to be the definition of reasonable doubt.

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How many headlines have screamed about non unanimous juries being ar fault for convicting the innocent? 0?

Jury nullification is real, beyond a doubt and not reasonable.
How Constitutional? Johnson v. Louisiana, 406 U.S. 356 (1972) SCOTUS.

One or two nut jobs can derail justice, just ask EWE.

If 10 is not enough and twelve is better, why not put 20 on the jury? Then would 18 be ok?

Voting to keep our 100+ year Justice System working.

I believe the studies done show that there was no difference statistically in wrongful conviction rates between 10-2 and 12-0, but that 10-2 jury trials and trial processes were abundantly more efficient.

I think what people gloss over regarding this issue is the other side of the race argument coin. It will now take 12 votes for not guilty, and if one person is refusing to vote not guilty purely on race, then you have a hung jury. Because of this, I actually think that in some ways 10-2 is the best way to avoid that dilemma.

You should also know that many other countries (France, Ireland, I think England) don’t have unanimous juries either. In fact, I think Ireland starts 15-0, then whittles down every hour the jury is out and can get as low as 8-7!

Oh and by the way, the other state that also doesn’t have unanimous juries is Oregon. Don’t know how much the Jim Crow era affected their law formation.

If it changes, I don’t think the system will come crashing down or change that much. Everyone will survive and DA’s will just have to learn to adapt. Just food for thought on points that never seem to get brought up

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How do you know the prosecutor was incompetent?

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Because he didn't know how to get in his key piece of evidence, which any third year law student would have been able to do.

Like I posted last time:

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On a separate issue, the prosecutor would have had to have been utterly incompetent to not get in the prior testimony of the complainant. A situation in which someone previously testified but is now deceased clearly falls within La. C.E. Art. 804, which are exceptions to the hearsay rule in which the declarant is unavailable. In this case, the complainant would have been considered unavailable under A(4) and the testimony would have been covered under B(1).

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Was on a jury that convicted 11-1 for a breaking-entering and theft. They had him on video committing the crime.

The reason the juror vote not to convict was
"none of all considered that Mr. Johnson (defendent) might be a ghost."