It seems like the jury weighing the federal charges against Kwame Kilpatrick, Bernard Kilpatrick, and Bobby Ferguson have been deliberating for a long time. Today was the 12th day of deliberations.
At the same time, the 12 jurors must reach unanimous agreement on each of the 45 charges (30 against Kwame, 4 against Bernard, and 11 against Ferguson), so maybe this lengthy deliberation is to be expected. It’s worthwhile to note that the jury hasn’t yet suggested they are deadlocked.
Every jury is unique and every case is different, obviously, but we wondered if there was any data available to help establish an estimate of how long it takes an average jury to decide on an average case and compare that to where we are with Kilpatrick.
An article in a 2009 issue of the “Review of Law & Economics” entitled “Factors Affecting the Length of Time a Jury Deliberates: Case Characteristics and Jury Composition” explored this issue.
Its authors cited a data set from the “Multnomah County [Oregon] Jury Project,” which looked at a series of juries in the mid-1970s. The study reviewed 931 12-person jury trials and observed it took juries an average of 114 minutes to come to a verdict. The paper cited another data set to calculate an average time of 121.5 minutes for a 12-person jury to reach a verdict. The severity of the charges also plays a role.
In criminal trials, juries that are considering charges having to do with crimes against a person (murder, rape, assault) will end up deliberating longer on average than a jury considering other, less severe, criminal charges (robbery, fraud, illicit card games, etc.). A comparison of means test shows that crimes against persons do result in long jury deliberation times relative to crimes against property. The average time for a jury considering more severe charges is 136.3 minutes (7.7 standard error) and the average length of time for less severe charges is 109.9 minutes (2.74 standard error).
Some required rendering a verdict on multiple counts, while other jury presumably only had to reach a conclusion on one charge.
So what does that tell us about the Kilpatrick jury? Nothing definitive, obviously. Unlike a case where the defendant is facing multiple charges that overlap, this jury is wading through 45 rather complex Federal felony charges. If the jury concludes a murder defendant killed a guy, it’s doubtful they’ll spend too much time arguing about his guilt/innocence with ancillary weapons charges.
If we assume, not unreasonably, that each Kilpatrick charge requires its own deliberation process to consider specific evidence related to the specific charge against a specific defendant, and if a jury takes about 110 minutes to deliberate these kinds of charges, then it’s reasonable to assume it would take the “average” jury about 80 hours to get through each of the 45 counts against the Kilpatricks and Ferguson.
Today, the jury spent about six hours deliberating before heading home around 3 PM. For nine of previous 11 days of deliberation, they spent seven hours discussing the case each day. One day they went home after just two hours because a juror was sick. The first day of deliberation began late in the afternoon, giving them only a couple hours to work on the case that day.
All told, this jury has been deliberating for about 73 hours. So, yeah, while it seems like this jury has been out for a long time, given the number of charges and complexity of the case, it’s entirely plausible and not at all surprising they need a couple more days to get through it all.
