This study uses a new criminal case data set to partially replicate Kalven and Zeisel's classic study of judge‐jury agreement. The data show essentially the same rate of judge‐jury agreement as did Kalven and Zeisel for cases tried almost 50 years ago. This study also explores judge‐jury agreement as a function of evidentiary strength (as reported by both judges and juries), evidentiary complexity (as reported by both judges and juries), legal complexity (as reported by judges), and locale. Regardless of which adjudicator's view of evidentiary strength is used, judges tend to convict more than juries in cases of “middle” evidentiary strength. Judges tend to acquit more than juries in cases in which judges regard the evidence favoring the prosecution as weak. Judges tend to convict more than juries in cases in which judges regard the evidence favoring the prosecution as strong. Rates of adjudicator agreement are thus partly a function of which adjudicator's view of evidentiary strength is used, a result not available to Kalven and Zeisel, who were limited to judges’ views of the evidence. We find little evidence that evidentiary complexity or legal complexity help explain rates of judge‐jury disagreement. Rather, the data support the view that judges have a lower conviction threshold than juries. Local variation exists among the sites studied. The influences of juror race, sex, and education are also considered.

Approximately 6 percent of criminal juries hang. But, how many dissenters carry the jury, hang the jury, or conform to the majority's wishes? This article examines the formation of individual verdict preferences, the impact of deliberation, and the role of the dissenter using data from nearly 3,500 jurors who decided felony cases. Jurors were asked: "If it were entirely up to you as a one-person jury, what would your verdict have been in this case?" Over one-third of jurors, privately, would have voted against their jury's decision. Analyses identify the characteristics of jurors who dissent, and distinguish dissenters who hang the jury from dissenters who acquiesce. Deliberation procedures, juror role expectations, their evidentiary views, and their sense of fairness affected the likelihood of dissent. Contrary to previous research, deliberations play a vital role in generating juror consensus and shed new light on the debate over the requirement that juries be unanimous in their verdict.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees criminal defendants the right to an impartial jury selected from a jury pool that reflects the demographic composition of the geographic community served by the court. Yet there is little consensus in case law from state and federal courts about the most appropriate method of measuring demographic representation or the degree of underrepresentation that would violate the fair‐cross‐section requirement. Although the U.S. Supreme Court recently addressed these issues for the first time since Duren v. Missouri, its opinion in Berghuis v. Smith did little to settle the questions. In the present article, the authors use demographic information from the U.S. Census Bureau and information about jury operations in state courts from the National Center for State Courts to estimate the potential impact of competing proposals about how to measure demographic representation at different threshold levels of constitutional tolerance. Given the demographic composition of counties in the United States and the size of the jury pool in most courts, the authors find that a bright‐line rule using either of the two most common measures of representation (absolute disparity and comparative disparity) would create “safe harbors” in which the courts in a majority of jurisdictions across the country would become effectively immune from fair‐cross‐section challenges.

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