BBM - FWIW - On several of the juries I have served on, a preliminary poll was taken in the very beginning of deliberations as to whether each juror felt the defendant is guilty or not guilty to try to establish a baseline as to where the majority of the jurors stood. Usually the preliminary vote was done blindly (i.e. by writing your vote on a piece of paper unanimously). The foreperson would tally the results and that's when deliberations began. There was only one case where every juror voted the same (guilty) - which was easy to go from there. Even in that case, all evidence presented during the trial was re-reviewed just to make sure that everyone truly felt the defendant was guilty and that nothing was missed.
The majority of times; however, there was an "initial" split - it tended to be more like an 85%-90% vote one way and the remainder either "undecided" or the opposite of the majority. (Of note: The majority of the times it was determined that the undecided or opposing jurors were split because they had simply misinterpreted evidence that was presented or missed a critical piece of the evidence/testimony, or didn't understand what was said, etc.)
Once the preliminary vote was determined, the foreperson would start by reviewing each piece of evidence presented and promote a discussion as to what jurors thought about it and ask jurors to pose any questions for group discusison. All evidence was reviewed (sometimes so much so that you got sick of hearing it again) and sometimes questions were submitted to the baliff if jurors needed more information. After reviewing all evidence and hearing each jurors thoughts/opinions, another vote was taken blindly. A lot of times, after the foreperson facilitated review of the evidence and group discussion, some jurors would change their vote voluntarily (unanimously).
There was always one person (or two) who held out longer than the majority - but a lot of times it was felt that the juror was holding out for no real reason other than to be temporarily ornery. LOL I relate it to the posters on here who sometimes try to play devils advocate to stir people to think outside the box and are not so quick to agree with the majority even though they may secretly agree. Although it did cause blood pressures to rise and some jurors to become "passionate" - everyone was entitled to their opinion and the evidence in question was represented, rediscussed as many times as necessary to try to prevent a hung jury. There were two occasions when it was felt that we would have a hung jury, but both times it always worked itself out after the juror who was holding out stated his/her reasons for feeling the way he/she did and others would merely play devils advocate back to that juror with the juror ultimately changing his/her vote. In my experience, no juror was ever belittled or bullied into changing their vote!
Deliberations went on for as long as it took to try to reach a fair and true verdict, whether guilty, not-guilty, or unable to reach a decision.
It is a very thorough process, very time consuming, very passionate, with clear leaders, clear followers, clear stubborn folks, and even those with their own agenda. In the end, however, I truly believe that the verdicts were done thorougly and "fairly" with every sincere regard to the "innocent until proven guilty" right of the defendant. JMOO
By the way, the shortest deliberations I was involved in was 3 1/2 hours (all voted guilty initially and upon re-review of evidence), and the longest was 6 days for a murder case.
And even though in each case jurors were tired and wanted to go home as soon as possible, it was my experience that all jurors took the job VERY seriously and stuck to their belief that they held someone's life in their hands and took the time to methodically go through piece by piece of evidence/testimony - no matter how long it took - until a fair decision was reached!
