The jury is still out..........................

The jury is still out

Meaning

Judgement 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. The
emergence of the figurative use of 'the jury is still out', i.e. as a
reference to a non-legal decision where no actual jury is involved,
began in the USA in the 1940s and has now become somewhat hackneyed.
For example, the expression was used in a report of a baseball game,
published in the Indiana newspaper The Terre Haute Star in July 1949:

The jury is still out on his [Orestes Minoso] batting ability.

There are a few examples of the phrase's use, mostly in a sporting
context, throughout the 1940s and 50s, but it was a specific event
that brought it fully into the language - the infamous Finch-Tregoff
murder trials in 1959/61. Dr. Bernard Finch was a middle-aged Los
Angeles surgeon and Carole Tregoff was described in newspapers at the
time as 'his shapely young receptionist'. The murder of Finch's wife
and the subsequent trials were a cause célèbre. At each of the the
couple's three trials the jury took their time in coming to a
judgement 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.

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