Both cases I was on jury duty for were 12 person, so I'm sure the dynamic is very different. We didn't have any posturing from anyone. The problem in the criminal case is that 11 of us could see from the first poll that the defendants were guilty, and 1 guy sympathized with the fact that they were recent immigrants and really, really didn't want them to be guilty. It took many hours and a lot of gentle walking through the evidence to show him that all the surveillance footage did indeed show the defendants breaking the law (it was an FBI sting operation, complete with airplane surveillance). The other thing we needed to point out to him is that these people were the little fish and that the feds would probably wind up reducing their sentence if they gave up the big fish down in Chicago.

The civil case I was on was actually more similar to the Zimmerman one. We had to consider the Wisconsin Lemon Law, which is a really badly written law. Though we didn't want to find in favor of the plaintiff (we didn't like the defendants either, for that matter) the way the law was written we had to. It's the same thing that should happen here. Bad law, needs to be rewritten, but it is what it is.