Miscellaneous

Can You Afford Deadlock?

By Anne Skove, Esq.

Everybody hates deadlocked juries: the jurors who squabble among themselves, the parties who wait out the case in a wobbly state of uncertainty, the judges who encourage closure from the bench, the press who hates to wait for anything longer than 5 minutes...

Courts with tight budgets hate deadlock, too, Retrials cost money that the courts don't have.

Jury trials, with their list-making, summonsing, free parking, and complimentary coffee, are expensive enough. When jury one doesn't work out, jury two must do the job. Thurston County, Washington, broke down costs of a recent 8-day criminal jury trial:

• $17,500+ for six American Sign Language interpreters (the defendant and the accuser are hearing impaired). This figure includes the interpreters' daily rate and hotel costs. If you're wondering whether they really needed six, the answer is yes: one translated proceedings for the defendant, one covered witness testimony for the audience, one translated proceedings for witnesses, and all required one backup (translating is very intense work).


• $3000 for jury travel costs. Thurston County pays 58.5 cents/mile.


• $10/day per juror for the jury stipend.


• Office of Assigned Counsel fees.


• Postage for juror mailings.

Add, multiply times two, and you get a baseline figure (which of course omits many other costs associated with a jury trial).

Needless to say, this case broke the Thurston County court budget. Now the court must go a-begging to county commissioners. Nobody thinks the county will refuse to fund a Constitutional right, but it is unclear where the money will come from.

How can this be avoided? Judges have some neat tricks to encourage jurors to keep on keeping on. An extra day of deliberations, if it results in a verdict, is better than deadlock.

In its hung jury study, the Center for Jury Studies at the National Center for State Courts has identified five basic causes of deadlock:

• 1. Weak evidence. This was by far the most common cause in the NCSC study. Weakness came in many guises -- close cases, victim credibility, unsympathetic victim, etc.


• 2. Police credibility. This was a common factor in deadlocked drug cases in the study.


• 3. Juror concerns about fairness. This was an issue where jurors "thought the law was unfair, that the legally correct outcome was unfair, that they were concerned about the consequences of a conviction to the defendant and/or that they thought the penalty was too harsh."


• 4. Case complexity. The complexity can be of the law or the evidence, or both.


• 5. Dysfunctional deliberation process. Difficult personalities on the jury, social conflicts, domineering jurors, and anyone who was ever told they did not "play well with others" make deliberations hard (and expensive) for everybody.

See County Over Budget for Jury Costs, Jeremy Pawloski, The Olympian (August 30, 2008).

Full post as published by court-o-rama.org on August 31, 2008 (boomark / email).