Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting

Timothy Feddersen and Wolfgang Pesendorfer

American Political Science Review, 1998, vol. 92, issue 1, 23-35

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.

Date: 1998
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