The danger of deadlock: coercion in the courtroom.

• Author: Ward, Joseph
• Position: Jury deadlock - Florida

Swift justice demands more than just swiftness.(1)

As the preceding quote alludes, juries do not have easy tasks in delivering justice, particularly in criminal trials in which an accused's life and liberty commonly lie at risk.(2) Not surprisingly, the differing backgrounds of jurors and their correspondingly different views of the evidence presented during trial often result in an inability, at least initially, to reach a unanimous verdict. When a jury "cannot reach a verdict by the required voting margin," a hung, or deadlocked, jury results.(3)

Deadlocked juries present a discouraging dilemma to trial judges and counsel hoping to avert costly retrials and avoid bogging down in a quagmire of drawn-out deliberations. The primary danger jury deadlock poses for the unwary trial judge is the possibility of reversal on appeal due to the perception of court coercion. The lurking danger of preservation failure looms with equal foreboding for inattentive trial counsel.

Generally, trial courts have wide discretion in matters involving jury and trial management.(4) However, trial judges may not stray far from a predetermined path when a deadlocked jury erects a barrier to case resolution. When orchestrating jury deliberations, "a trial court should not couch an instruction to a jury or otherwise act in any way that would appear to coerce any juror to reach a hasty decision or to abandon a conscientious belief in order to achieve a unanimous position."(5) A trial judge must avoid any appearance of an attempt "to lead the jury to believe that they [are] required to reach a verdict."(6)

In 1983, Judge Glickstein of the Fourth District Court of Appeal summarized the considerations encompassing a trial court's handling of a jury deadlocked during its deliberations:

It is the genius of our jury system that twelve impartial persons, individually, applying a subjective standard, come to a common conclusion of defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This fundamental principle becomes subverted if a jury member is pressured to defer to the opinion of his peers, for unanimity is made a sham thereby. An objective standard is in effect substituted for the subjective, by virtue of the implication that the majority opinion is reasonable, and the minority, unreasonable. Here the trial court may have led one or more jurors to capitulate, against his or her conscientious judgment, because the court made it appear that unless a verdict was reached great waste would occur and the court's confidence in the jury's common sense would somehow have been betrayed.(7)

In an effort to prevent jury coercion by trial judges, the Florida Supreme Court crafted a jury instruction commonly referred to as an Allen charge that "allows a jury to continue deliberations, even after it has announced its inability to do so, where there is a reasonable basis to believe a verdict is possible, while cautioning jurors that they should not abandon their views just to get a verdict or to accommodate the majority."(8) The deadlock instruction is also referred to as a "dynamite charge" for its "ability to blow apart deadlock."(9)

Florida Standard Jury Instruction (Crim.) 3.06 on jury deadlock evolved from the concerns about trial court interference with jury deliberations first voiced by the U.S. Supreme Court in Allen v. United States, 164 U.S. 492 (1896). In Allen, the Court held that a jury instruction asking the members of the jury to reconsider their initial conclusions was not unduly coercive such that a mistrial was required, stating:

While, undoubtedly, the verdict of the jury should represent the opinion of each individual juror, it by no means follows that opinions may not be changed by conference in the jury room. The very object of the jury system is to secure unanimity by a comparison of views, and by arguments among the jurors themselves.... It cannot be that each...