Definition
A jury is said to be "hung" when its members are irreconcilably deadlocked and cannot reach a unanimous verdict — or, in jurisdictions permitting non-unanimous verdicts, cannot reach the required supermajority. A hung jury does not result in an acquittal or conviction; it typically leads the court to declare a mistrial, after which the prosecution may retry the defendant, dismiss the charges, or offer a plea agreement.
The term is informal but universally understood in American legal practice and appears in both legal and everyday discourse about trials.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Simple past and past participle of "hang" in most senses, with "hanged" reserved for execution by hanging.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "Hung" used as past tense of "hang" in general contexts; the entry illustrates with "hung beef" — meat salted and suspended to dry.
The gap is significant. In ordinary English, "hung" is simply a verb form. In legal usage, it functions as a specialized adjective modifying "jury" to describe a specific procedural outcome — deadlock — with real consequences for whether a defendant faces retrial. A researcher encountering "hung jury" in historical sources should not read the word "hung" as carrying any connotation of execution or suspension; it describes a jury that has been left suspended, unable to move, in deliberation.
Common Confusion
"Hung jury" is sometimes confused with "acquittal" by non-lawyers. They are legally distinct. An acquittal ends jeopardy; the defendant cannot be retried for the same offense. A hung jury results in a mistrial, which does not bar retrial under the Double Jeopardy Clause. The distinction is consequential for both criminal defense research and prosecution strategy.
Why It Matters in Research
The term itself is simple, but its procedural consequences are not. Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus should note several points:
First, "hung jury" as a phrase is largely a product of American legal vernacular. In older English sources and some Commonwealth materials, the concept may appear instead under "disagreement of the jury," "jury unable to agree," or "jury discharged without verdict." Historical English sources may not use "hung" at all, so keyword searches on that term alone will miss relevant doctrine in pre-20th-century materials.
Second, the standard of unanimity — which determines how easily a jury can be hung — has shifted over time and varies by jurisdiction. Historical sources uniformly assume unanimity as the common law baseline. Modern doctrine, following Apodaca v. Oregon (1972) and its subsequent erosion in Ramos v. Louisiana (2020), has changed the federal constitutional landscape considerably. Researchers tracing hung jury doctrine across periods should be attentive to which unanimity rule was operative.
Third, the procedural consequences following a hung jury — whether retrial is permitted, how prosecutorial discretion operates, what role a judge may play in urging further deliberations (the "Allen charge" or "dynamite charge") — generate substantial case law that is not captured by dictionaries. The hung jury is a trigger for a body of doctrine, not a doctrine unto itself.
Fourth, Bouvier's entry for "hung" simply cites Anderson's, and Anderson's gives only a single-sentence definition. Neither source addresses mistrial procedure, Double Jeopardy implications, or judicial instructions to deadlocked juries. For those questions, dictionaries are the wrong tool; researchers should move to encyclopedias and treatises immediately.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's Dictionary of Law and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in complete agreement here, with Bouvier explicitly citing Anderson as his source. Both entries are identical in substance: a hung jury is one that fails to agree upon a verdict. The brevity is itself informative — the term was treated as self-explanatory colloquialism requiring no elaboration, not as a technical term demanding formal definition.
Neither source addresses what happens procedurally after a jury hangs, nor do they engage with the unanimity requirement that underlies the concept. This reflects the era: in the 19th century, jury unanimity was an unquestioned common law baseline, and the procedural consequences of deadlock (mistrial and possible retrial) were well-settled enough to require no dictionary treatment. Researchers should not interpret this brevity as historical unimportance — the hung jury was a recognized phenomenon; it simply did not generate definitional controversy at the time these dictionaries were compiled.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Mistrial and Hung Jury — The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia