Does Belief Beyond a Reasonable Doubt Require Unanimity Among Jurors?

Youngjae Lee, Reasonable Doubt and Disagreement, 23 Legal Theory 203 (2017). Barbara Levenbook Although in most states and in the federal system, the law’s answer to the title question is “yes,” Youngjae Lee’s answer—with a qualification it will take the rest of this jot to explain—is “no.” To be more precise, his answer, surprisingly, is that it depends on the issue that is liable to disagreement. Making certain assumptions, Lee argues that unanimity is the best rule to adopt for juries reaching decisions about empirical facts in criminal cases. In these circumstances, requiring unanimity among jurors is both most faithful to the beyond-the-reasonable-doubt requirement for conviction and most faithful to the justification of this requirement. But juries must make decisions on all of the elements of crimes (and sometimes on affirmative defenses, I might add); to do this, often juries must make decisions on issues that are at…

Read more detail on Recent Administrative Law posts –

This entry was posted in Administrative law and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply