By Chauncey Cao | March 14, 2026

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted in 1791, states that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused has the right to a trial by an impartial jury of the state and district in which the individual allegedly committed a crime.”¹ Likewise, the Seventh Amendment allows the right to a jury trial in civil cases.² Together, these amendments ensure that a trial would be overseen by an unbiased, impartial, and diverse group of jurors when reaching its final verdict. But it’s not always easy to reach a unanimous agreement on a case and give a final verdict. When a jury fails to reach unanimity, a hung jury occurs.

What makes hung juries important is that they can often lead to retrials, which is an exception made to the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting one from being tried twice over the same case.³ The possibility of a retrial also creates exceptions to the unanimous requirements in the judicial system. Reforming the jury system to avoid deadlocks risks destroying the very thing that makes it valuable: its democratic nature. While hung juries create inconsistencies, they are a necessary byproduct of a system that prioritizes thorough deliberation. This analysis concludes that the current jury structure should be preserved to ensure that verdicts remain representative and credible.

Juries are built for diversity, yet they operate under the strict requirement of unanimity. When twelve people from different backgrounds and belief systems are tasked with reaching a single, collective decision, the friction between their perspectives can lead to a deadlock. Consequently, the very diversity that gives the jury its credibility also makes a hung jury an almost inevitable feature of the U.S. legal system. According to the National Center for State Courts, approximately 6% of the 33,000 jury trials analyzed resulted in a hung jury.⁴ Hung juries are often viewed as a systemic failure because they exhaust the resources of everyone involved.

Beyond the emotional toll, the financial costs to the opposing parties and the judiciary make a lack of a verdict a costly and inefficient outcome. Research from the 1990s suggests that “[T]rials cost each party $2,000 a day and up, depending on the number of attorneys representing the party. Expert witnesses’ fees and expenses can add another $1,000 to $2,000 a day for every day or part of a day that the witness must be in court.”⁵ Given the modern growth in procedural complexity and the rising demand for technological support, these costs have only increased. When a jury fails to reach a consensus, the prosecution, the defendant, and the court bear the resulting financial burden. The financial fallout of a hung jury extends to the taxpayer. Because judicial funding is a necessary public expenditure, rising costs due to trial deadlocks create a budgetary strain. Enhancing court efficiency by minimizing hung juries is therefore not just a legal goal but a fiscal necessity to reduce the overall cost of the American justice system.

Aside from the financial burdens imposed on both parties going through trial, the parties represented in court also suffer from a prolonged trial. According to an article from the Fully Informed Jury Association, a prominent non-profit research organization, “Undoing a conviction is very difficult. An appeal is not guaranteed in the first place. It may not be legally permitted, the defendant may no longer have the financial resources to mount an appeal… that individual no longer enjoys the presumption of innocence.”⁶ A retrial following a hung jury is, in practice, a second prosecution for the same offense. While the law avoids “double jeopardy” labels by seating a fresh jury and declaring the first trial “incomplete,” the burden on the defendant remains the same: a duplicate round of mental and financial torment. This creates a loophole where the spirit of the Fifth Amendment is sacrificed for the procedural mandates of the Seventh. By allowing the government to “try again” after failing to secure a conviction, the judicial system sends a dangerous signal that constitutional protections can be circumvented through procedural technicalities. 

It’s visible that a hung jury brings many detriments. It poses financial, mental, and ethical pressure to the judicial system, the jurors, the defendant, and all other parties involved in a trial. At the same time, a resulting retrial raises constitutional concerns and can undermine court credibility. But the most vital obligation of the judicial system is to ensure the unanimous right to be tried democratically and fairly. Imposing systemic changes to artificially reduce the frequency of hung juries would likely come at the expense of judicial fairness. Such reforms risk shifting the nature of jury deliberations from heterogeneous debate to forced homogeneity, antithetical to the very purpose of the jury system. To preserve an ideal judicial environment, the administrative and financial trade-offs inherent in a deadlock must be tolerated as a necessary price for democratic integrity.

Despite the many inconveniences coming from a hung jury, our current judicial system design and the role of a jury trial are irreplaceable for more important reasons. Such a hypothetical reduction in jury size would increase trial efficiency at the price of neglecting democratic representation in court and disregarding the absolute accuracy required in determining one’s guilt in a criminal case. The U.S. judicial system should, in fact, retain its current systematic design and tolerate the existence of a hung jury to ensure a more legitimate, accurate, democratic, and constitutional criminal trial environment.

^{1 U.S. Const. amend. VI
2 U.S. Const. amend. VII
3 U.S. Const. amend. V
4 Data for court professionals, National Center for State Courts, https://www.courtstatistics.org/__data/assets/pdf_file/0022/30559/A-Profile-of-Hung-Juries.pdf.
5 Edward P. Richards, Trial Costs and the Verdict, The Climate Change and Public Health Law Site (1993), http://biotech.law.lsu.edu/books/lbb/x50.htm.
6 What Happens if There is a Hung Jury?, Fully Informed Jury Association, https://fija.org/library-and-resources/library/jury-nullification-faq/what-happens-if-there-is-a-hung-jury.html.}