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Guilty by a 10-2 Vote: Efficient or Unconstitutional?

By standdown

That's the title of Adam Liptak's latest Sidebar column in today's New York Times.  LINK  Here's an extended excerpt:?Twelve Angry Men? might have been a much shorter movie had it been set in Oregon. Instead of letting Juror No. 8, the lone holdout played by Henry Fonda, methodically convince his fellow jurors that there was good reason to doubt the defendant?s guilt, an Oregon jury might have just voted and been done with it. That?s because Oregon is one of only two states that does not require juries to reach unanimous verdicts in criminal cases. Like Louisiana, it allows convictions by a vote of 10 to 2. In a pair of decisions in 1972, the Supreme Court said that was all right, that the Constitution does not require states to insist on unanimity...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on July 07, 2009 (boomark / email).