Information cascades in juries
In most courts around the world, the standard procedure for jurors to announce their decisions is a simultaneous vote. If jurors were to vote sequentially, there would be pressure from previous votes to align yourself with the group; an information cascade of conformity if you will. In other words, there is a social pressure to make the decision that ends up being majority. In addition, one might use the previous votes as a source of information, and change your opinion on that basis. So in either case, the more previous guilty votes there are, the less likely you are to vote innocent. In his book “The Legal Analyst” (http://www.thelegalanalyst.com/Cascades.pdf), Dr. Farnsworth analyzes situations such as this in the field of law.
The idea of juries is to provide a representative sample group of a citizen’s peers, and have them independently decide whether his actions were wrong or not. As mentioned before, there is a social pressure that can lead to the opinions of the first two or three individuals deciding the verdict. Smaller samples have larger variances, so such decisions are to be avoided. Military courts add another layer of complexity, because individuals are not only concerned with conformity, but due to the hierarchical structure of the military, they weigh the opinions of their superiors much more than those of their peers and possibly their own. Therefore, many military courts vote in reverse order of rank, so that inferior officers do not all simply agree with the highest ranking officer in the room. In addition, due to the fact that superior officers would probably be considered more knowledgeable, it is better to have them go last as individuals with more information should go after individuals with less.