What juries usually do – hard statistical data
<p>This morning the jury in the Manafort case had not yet returned a verdict but said they had a partial verdict. It was not yet clear on how many of the charges they had reached a verdict. A commentator on TV said something like "If a jury has decided he's not guilty on 16 of the 17 charges, then usually they will....etc....etc."</p>

<p>Does someone collect data on such situations that indicates what they usually do, or how often they do what?</p>

<p>Actual jury verdicts are a matter of public record maintained by the clerk of the court for each respective court. This tells someone the final verdict in the case and the nature of the case, but it would be much more cumbersome to obtain the full dialog between a jury and the court during deliberations, which would require someone to commission of transcript of that part of the official record of the case on a case by case basis.</p>

<p>There are private parties who study such things and collect data in connection with their research on a research project by research project basis. Mostly, these people are professors at universities or colleges, think tank fellows, and, in civil cases, commercial data collectors, especially a firm that operates under the trademark "Jury Verdict Reporter".</p>

<p>There is also a cottage industry of professional "jury consultants" who study these matters and share information with each other as well.</p>

<p>In criminal cases, both prosecutors and public defenders typically handle scores to hundreds of cases per year, the vast majority of which are before juries, so anyone who has experience in one of those positions for many years also has a quite accurate understanding of what juries tend to do in various situations. </p>

<p>Journalists who have covered a court beat, bailiffs, judges, and the courtroom clerks of trial judges, tend to acquire this knowledge, over years of experience.</p>

<p>Civil jury trials are vastly less common, so lawyers who have never had criminal practices rarely acquire this depth of knowledge about how juries behave from personal observation. The average lawyer conducts less than one civil jury trial per lifetime (although that is, in part, because many lawyers do not have civil trial practices). I have more jury trial experience than the average civil trial lawyer and have participated as a lawyer in fewer than ten of them in twenty years.</p>

<p>It depends on the jury and their cultural background, but even more so on the specific facts of the matter.</p>

<p>In a case where the facts aren't clearly one way or the other, some juries tend to want to be polarized, selecting either all not guilty or all guilty, while other juries want to at least find guilty on something so that they can be sure they weren't 100% wrong.</p>

<p>This 2nd way is often seen where someone is charged with murder and the facts are very 50-50 and it's not clear whether the accused person is guilty. Juries of this type tend to want to find the person guilty of a lesser charge such as manslaughter. In a case with many charges, this can manifest in a jury that finds the person guilty on some of the lesser charges.</p>

<p>Jury statistics are more useful in steering juries than they are at predicting juries. Unless the evidence can only be interpreted in 1 way, juries can be more likely to make their decision based on what they heard in the elevator on the way up to the court room than on the facts of the case.</p>

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