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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

Timothy Feddersen  and
Wolfgang Pesendorfer
Timothy Feddersen
Affiliation:
Northwestern University
Wolfgang Pesendorfer
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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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.

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Type
Articles
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American Political Science Review , Volume 92 , Issue 1 , March 1998 , pp. 23 - 35
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1998 

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