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Juries are picked randomly from the population, right? What are the dynamics within those juries like? How often do they not agree? Not knowing anything about i

• HWR_14 4y ago
  Juries are picked randomly from a subset of the population. Obvious groups like non-citizens, felons, minors, the elderly, those who cannot speak English or people with disabilities that make it hard to serve (mental issues, blindness/deafness) are excluded. Individual cases also add more exclusions like knowing anyone involved or having biases like being a doctor on a medical malpractice case. Hung juries are fairly rare. In the federal courts, it's around 2.5%. A big part of this is weak cases that are likely to result in hung jury are not pursued before that point. This is the intended goal, to make it less likely innocent people have to go to trial. After all lawyers and putting your life on hold to go to court is expensive. The other driver is that what the jury is asked is to decide if something factually happened. The information that should drive that decision was presented to them in court after both lawyers and a judge vetted it. So whats left are multiple interpretations of the evidence and fuzzier things like "that witness didn't seem trustworthy". This isn't a question like "what's your opinion of [Politician X]".