Until recently, military juries only needed to get 67% of the jurors to convict the accused. To make it more fair, the military changed the conviction threshold to 75% of the jurors voting to convict.
This is substantially different than civilian juries that require that 100% of the jurors must vote to convict in order to achieve a conviction. Except for Grand Juries, most common juries are comprised of 12 jurors, which means that during deliberations, if the jurors has three jurors that have a guilty conscience about convicting an innocent man, the military can still achieve the conviction standard and send him/her off to prison.
In other words, if convening authorities are having difficulty imposing unlawful command influence on jury members he hand-picked with the threat of destroying a career with a bad officer evaluation report (OER, or FITREP for naval officers), then all the CA has to do is to ensure that at least 75% of the jurors are feeling pressure to vote for conviction.
This is a nice little buffer to ensure a conviction and remove anyone in the convening authority’s command he/she doesn’t like. It’s no wonder the conviction rate in the military is high.
MORE TO COME….