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Comment by jxcole | Hacker News Reader

Having been on a jury in the US one time (attempted murder), the purpose of this system is probably not at all obvious. The idea is to put 12 people in a room and force them to agree to the same thing. You can deliberate almost any amount of time you want. If you try to tell the judge after a single day of delibrations that you are a hung jury, the judge will force you to stay longer. Only in extreme cases where the jury has been hung for a very long time does the judge allow a mistrial.

So the idea is to force 12 people to convince each other of one idea or the other.

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In the final play of the Orestia trilogy by Aeschylus, the goddess Athena convenes a jury of twelve citizens to decide the guilt of Orestes in the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra.

The jury is evenly split, and Athena adds a final vote for innocence, calling it her precedent.

It is unfortunate that the United States did not follow this ancient judicial custom EDIT: to acquit if half the jury refuses to convict.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oresteia#The_Eumenides

(I live in a midsize U.S. town that happens to have the oldest community theater that performs Greek plays in mask every year.)

> It is unfortunate that the United States did not follow this ancient judicial custom.

Requiring a simple majority of the jury for a serious criminal conviction, but splitting ties for the defense, rather than the US practice of requiring a unanimous verdict for conviction?

>So the idea is to force 12 people to convince each other of one idea or the other.

You said nothing to contradict the GP. If someone is on trial, all they need is one of the twelve to not be convinced of guilt. Your phrasing of "force" that one person to change their mind is absolutely insane to me.

Well, I think the clarification is important. It's not like you just go for a vote, and if there's no consensus outcome, boom, mistrial.

Judges aim for consensus, and juries are intended to debate/discuss until they can reach it. So the complaint about "well, prosecutors can just keep trying" rings a little more hollow in that case.

(Again, there are a ton of other reasonable complaints--bullshit forensic "science", the fact that expert witnesses cost money that defendants don't have, mandatory minimum sentences, federal prosecutors' aversion to risking losses at trial, the awful penal system, etc. But this is a weird one to be hung up on, I think.)

Having been stuck on several courts-martial panels in the military as well as a civilian jury later for an assault trial, I found the military court system seemed, in many ways, more fair to the accused.

On the flip side, the verdict does not have to be unanimous.

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