Citation

Neilson WS, Winter H. Int. Rev. Law Econ. 2005; 25(1): 1-19.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2005, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.irle.2005.05.004

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Relaxing the unanimity requirement for verdicts in a given criminal trial leads to fewer hung juries and more verdicts of all four types: correct and wrongful convictions, and correct and wrongful acquittals. A criminal proceeding, however, does not necessarily end when a jury hangs. We demonstrate that if retrials occur until a verdict is reached, a unanimous verdict rule is generally more accurate than a nonunanimous rule with respect to the probabilities of all four types of verdicts. Thus, a tradeoff between hung jury costs and verdict accuracy exists when considering unanimous versus nonunanimous verdict rules.