Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting
- 1 March 1998
- journal article
- Published by Cambridge University Press (CUP) in American Political Science Review
- Vol. 92 (1) , 23-35
- https://doi.org/10.2307/2585926
Abstract
It is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that the unanimity rule may lead to a high probability of both kinds of error and that the probability of convicting an innocent defendant may actually increase with the size of the jury. Finally, we demonstrate that a wide variety of voting rules, including simple majority rule, lead to much lower probabilities of both kinds of error.Keywords
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