What Is a Hung Jury: When a Jury Cannot Reach a Verdict

What a Hung Jury Is

A hung jury is a jury that has reached a deadlock — the jurors cannot agree on a verdict, and the level of agreement the system requires simply has not been reached. When that happens, no verdict is returned. The jury has not found the person guilty; it has not found the person not guilty. It has found itself unable to decide.

The phrase “hung” captures the situation well: the jury is suspended between positions, unable to move to a conclusion. From the outside it can feel like a result, but legally it is the absence of one. Nothing was proved, nothing was rejected — the process stalled before it could reach an answer.

Why the Level of Agreement Matters

Criminal jury systems are built around the idea that a verdict carries weight only when the jurors who return it have genuinely agreed. The level of agreement a system requires to convict or to acquit varies — it is set by the rules of the particular jurisdiction and, in some situations, by the type of case. The key point is that simply having a majority is not always enough, and in many systems the bar is set deliberately high.

When jurors disagree and the required level of agreement cannot be reached in either direction, the system has no mechanism to force a verdict. A tie cannot be broken by adding up the tallies and declaring a winner. Either the agreement is there or it is not — and when it is not, the matter remains unresolved.

What Happens Before a Jury Is Declared Unable to Agree

A jury is not usually declared deadlocked the moment disagreement surfaces. Courts generally take steps before giving up on a verdict, because a verdict — even one reached after difficult deliberations — resolves the case in a way that no verdict cannot.

In practice, this often means the court asks the jury to continue deliberating, sometimes more than once. The court may offer general encouragement to keep working toward agreement without telling jurors what conclusion to reach. At some point, if the court determines that further deliberation is not going to break the deadlock, it may conclude that a verdict is not possible and proceed accordingly. The precise procedures vary by jurisdiction.

What Tends to Follow — and the Connection to a Mistrial

A hung jury is one of the most common causes of a mistrial. When the court concludes that the jury cannot reach the required agreement, the trial ends without a verdict — which is what a mistrial is. For a fuller picture of what a mistrial means and how it differs from other outcomes, the guide What Is a Mistrial covers that in depth.

What comes after a hung jury varies and is not automatic in any direction. The underlying charge remains unresolved. One possibility is that the matter is tried again before a new jury. Another is that the case is resolved in some other way — through a negotiated resolution, a different charging decision, or a dismissal. Some matters are not pursued further at all. Which of these possibilities applies in a given situation depends on the system, the nature of the case, and the choices made by the parties involved.

How It Differs From an Acquittal or a Conviction

A hung jury is easy to mistake for a favorable outcome, but it is not an acquittal. An acquittal is a decision — a finding that the case was not proved — and it carries real legal consequences, including protections against being tried again on the same matter. A hung jury reaches no decision at all. The case did not go in the defendant’s favor; it simply did not go anywhere.

The same distinction applies on the other side. A hung jury is not a conviction either. Nothing was established against the defendant, no finding was made, and no sentence follows from it. The matter is unresolved — which is a fundamentally different position from having won or having lost. People who have lived through a hung jury sometimes describe it as being left in place: not cleared, not condemned, just still in the middle of something that was not finished.

That distinction matters practically. The door the case goes through is different depending on the outcome, and a hung jury leaves the door in a position the other outcomes do not.

Questions to Explore About a Hung Jury

Questions that tend to move past the label and toward what a hung jury actually means in a specific situation:

1. What level of agreement did this system require, and how far from that did the jury end up?
2. What steps did the court take before declaring the jury unable to agree, and were all of them completed?
3. Does this outcome lead to a mistrial, and if so, what are the realistic possibilities for how the matter gets resolved from here?
4. How is a hung jury being treated differently from an acquittal in terms of what can happen next?
5. What are the paths forward — a new trial, a negotiated resolution, or something else — and what shapes which of those applies in this situation?