It’s happening in courtrooms around the country: Juries are unable to come to a unanimous decision, resulting in hung juries.
On today’s episode of Dateline: True Crime Weekly, Andrea Canning talks to the director of the Center for Jury Studies, Paula Hannaford-Agor.
For the past 30 years she’s been helping court systems around the country understand what makes juries tick.
In the early 2000s, Hannaford-Agor was part of a project that posed the question: Are Hung Juries a Problem?
You can listen to the full episode now, for free.
Plus, read a transcript of their exchange below:
Canning: So, Paula, it feels like this is the summer of deadlocked juries. Is it just kind of no rhyme or reason and we’re just seeing more of it right now? Or is this a trend?
Hannaford-Agor: We don’t actually have very good statistics on jury deadlock. It just may be that these few couple of high-profile trials happen to result in hung juries, and because people are paying attention to them, it feels extraordinary.
Canning: You were one of the authors of a groundbreaking study “Why do hung juries hang?” What did you learn about the most common reasons for a hung jury?
Hannaford-Agor: It really has to do with the ambiguity of the evidence. The cases where juries are most likely to hang are the cases where there are pieces of evidence that reasonable people can disagree.
Canning: Yeah, when you look at the Karen Reed, the Samantha Woll case, they involve disputed or circumstantial evidence. In those instances, the prosecution is really asking the juries to rely on their common sense. Is that sort of the ambiguous evidence that you’re talking about?
Hannaford-Agor: Yeah, I mean, when you ask people to rely on their common sense, people are coming to the process with different life experiences, so you’re both looking at the same evidence and, like, going, ‘This is the way I interpret this.’ And you interpret it in a different way. You know, sometimes you can persuade the other person, but sometimes you’re, like, going, ‘No, I just fundamentally disagree with you.’
Canning: I’ve covered, uh, stories where, literally, the jurors have come to blows in the jury room -- physically -- where it can get that intense.
Hannaford-Agor: You hope that there are not crimes being committed in the deliberation room, um, in -- in most instances. But,yeah. I mean, this is -- this is serious stuff that we ask jurors to engage with.
Canning: And you say sometimes a hung jury has to do with the prosecutors, and -- and not the jury members.
Hannaford-Agor: So, the prosecutors have the discretion of what cases they bring. And you may see a prosecutor who is much more aggressive, bringing cases where the evidence is maybe not as strong. So you get marginal cases where you get hung juries because your jurors can’t actually agree.
Canning: So, you know, we -- we want the system to play out. But it is so devastating for all involved when you go through these long trials -- and some of them are just so emotionally draining -- and then you have this hung jury and a lot of times the prosecutor says, ‘We’re doing it again.’
Hannaford-Agor: Most trials that end up hanging are not retried. Based on the research that we did, um, we found that about two thirds of the trials, there was a plea agreement afterward, or the case was dismissed. But I want to push back a little bit on, sort of,this idea that -- that a hung jury is a failure. Fundamentally, the whole reason we have juries and jury trials is to ensure that before we convict somebody, the prosecution has proven their case beyond a reasonable doubt. And so, a hung jury -- the prosecution has not met its burden. That is not a failure of the system. That is the system actually working its way out exactly as intended.
