The jury is still out

from: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/jury-is-still-out.html

Meaning

Opinion has not yet been finalised on a particular subject; especially due to information being incomplete.

Origin

'The Jury Is Still Out' has been a staple headline in US newspapers for at least 150 years. For example, this from The New York Daily-Times, May 1850:

"The [Gardiner Trial] Jury are still out, with no prospect of immediate agreement."

The phrase has continued to be used in this literal sense. It came into the language in its more common present-day figurative form following its frequent use in the reporting of the infamous Finch-Tregoff murder trials in 1959/61. Dr. Bernard Finch was a middle-aged Los Angles surgeon and Carole Tregoff was described in papers at the time as 'his shapely young receptionist'. The murder of Finch's wife and Finch and Tregoff's subsequent trials was a cause célèbre. At each of their no less than three trials the jury took their time in coming to a judgment and hacks must have got tired of typing 'Jury Still Out' each day. This newspaper cutting was typical of the hundreds of stories that ran during 1959 to 1961:

At the third trial, during March and April 1961, the pair were finally convicted of murder.

The emergence of the figurative use of 'the jury is still out', i.e. as a reference to a non-legal decision and where no actual jury is involved, began around the same time and has now become somewhat hackeyed. For example, this piece from the Wisconsin State Journal, August 1961, which is in response to the newspaper dropping Rick and Bill Hackney's 'Sir Bagby' cartoon:

Editor's Note — The "jury" is still out on the fate of Sir Bagby's presence on the Comic page.

The presence of quotation marks around the word jury indicates that no real jury was deliberating on Sir Bagby's future.

Had Dr. Finch kept his mind on surgery, we would not now have the cliché 'the jury is still out' at our disposal. I've leave it to you to decide whether that's to the good or not.

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"The jury is still out" 起源，
主要是報導一件不有名謀殺案，在案情尚未明朗化之前，報紙上常用這樣的標題，原來字面上的意義是陪審團還在庭外尚未作出決議，後來被拿來用做比喻事情尚未定案。

The "jury" is still out on the fate of Sir Bagby's presence on the Comic page.像這樣的標題，jury被引號括起來，強調根本這件事情沒有陪審團，而只是拿這樣的一句來說明這件事情尚未明朗化。

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