It was Lee J. Cobb who barked in the film 12 Angry Men that there were no secrets inside a jury room. Now, at least one secret is on the outside: many jurors do not know what verdict they have just delivered.

Australian researchers, granted rare access by law officers to jurors emerging from court, were startled to find that most juries were far from agreed on what verdict they had delivered, despite the requirement that it be unanimous. The researchers questioned 277 jurors immediately after they had delivered their verdicts in 25 trials in Sydney involving sexual assaults on children.

Their first question was what the verdict was. But in only 6 of the 25 juries surveyed could all the jurors correctly state their judgment.

In 40 per cent of the trials at least one juror — and in some cases as many as four — said that the outcome had been “not guilty” because the judge had directed them to make such a decision. In reality, there had been no such direction from the bench.

For one of the trials, the ten participating jurors reported three versions of the verdict: seven said the jury was hung; one said the verdict was not guilty on some charges and jurors “could not agree” on others, and another juror reported that the accused was guilty on some charges but not on others. The actual verdict was that the accused was not guilty on each charge. The survey also revealed confusion among jurors on the significance of warnings from the bench. The researchers, commissioned by the New South Wales government’s Bureau of Crime Research, suggested that some jurors interpreted a judicial warning that it was “dangerous to convict” as a direction to acquit.

The findings have alarmed barristers and the researchers.Paul Byrne, a Sydney barrister who has studied jury trials for the NSW Law Reform Commission, said: “It is a fairly surprising thing that a jury, when surveyed, would get something as fundamental as verdict wrong.

“I can’t think of an explanation for this finding . . . I have certainly had instances of jurors being visibly distressed while giving what is a unanimous verdict, indicating they didn’t really agree or felt uncomfortable with it. But I have never had a case where a juror has said later they did not agree with the verdict.”

Don Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Research, also said that the findings were surprising. “If jurors genuinely don’t understand the range of verdicts we may need to do some more work in telling them what is going on,” he said. Of the 227 jurors questioned, 65 per cent were critical of their experience as a juror, citing upsetting evidence, poor facilities and disruption to their work or studies. Nearly 15 per cent were critical of what they thought were court inefficiencies, including
long-winded judges, too many breaks and time wasted on legal argument.

1847
The year that trial by jury was introduced to New South Wales

Source: Australian Parliament Library

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