Renico v. Lett

*780Justice Stevens,

with whom Justice Sotomayor joins, and with whom Justice Breyer joins as to Parts I and II, dissenting.

At common law, courts went to great lengths to ensure the jury reached a verdict. Fourteenth-century English judges reportedly loaded hung juries into oxcarts and carried them from town to town until a judgment “ ‘bounced out.' ”1 Less enterprising colleagues kept jurors as de facto “prisoners” until they achieved unanimity.2 The notion of a mistrial based on jury deadlock did not appear in Blackstone’s Commentaries;3 it is no surprise, then, that colonial juries virtually…