It’s not hard to pinpoint exactly where the defamation trial against former Butler County Commissioner Jim Eckstein fell apart.

It was the precise juncture on a late Friday afternoon at which the 12 jurors said they had arrived at a verdict, when clearly they had not.

At first glance is appeared a slam-dunk for the defense: not guilty on all counts. But a polling of the individual jurors found five voted Eckstein was guilty and seven he was not guilty of spreading a false rumor about his political opponent, former Commissioner Dale Pinkerton.

Earlier in the day, Butler County Judge Kelley Streib instructed the jurors that they needed at least 10 votes for a valid verdict.

The correct name for what developed is a deadlocked or hung jury — and even that’s premature considering the jurors had spent only a few hours going over eight days’ worth of testimony and evidence that had taken four years to gather and eight days to present in the civil trial.

Taking it a step further, it means that as much as each individual juror argued and reasoned and pieced together the evidence as they saw it, they couldn’t persuade enough of their fellow jurors to interpret the facts in the same light as they did.

That happens frequently and it not necessarily wrong. By most observers’ counts, this was a close case that could have gone either way. There’s no saying that more deliberation would have brought a verdict.

But what would be wrong is if the jury had not done a thorough review of the evidence. Only the dozen jurors can answer that. They’re under no obligation to say anything.

But one nagging fact remains: The detail they agreed on was whether or not they needed a mere majority verdict. The instructions regarding a 10-vote majority came from the judge herself, yet all 12 jurors persuaded each other that she’d told them just the opposite, that they did not need 10 votes.

Any one of the 12 had the right, if not the duty, to get word to the judge of an impending miscarriage of justice. It’s particularly confounding that the five who voted guilty remained silent rather than stand up for their belief.

If the jury had communicated to Judge Streib that they could not reach a verdict, it’s likely she would have instructed them to keep deliberating. It’s possible they would have reached a legitimate verdict.

But that’s not what happened.