Opinion ID: 203179
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Reported Deadlock

Text: When the court declared a mistrial, it did not treat the reported deadlock as an important factor in its mistrial decision. Near the beginning of the colloquy, the court stated, [i]f the Bible has played nothing in the jury deliberations, we can then move to an Allen charge. However, after questioning the jury foreperson, the court concluded that the Bible had played a role in deliberations and that, as a result, it [was] useless to give an Allen charge, which would have urged jurors to reexamine their positions and listen to the views of their fellow jurors. In the court's view, it was pointless to ask the jurors to reexamine their positions when those positions had been incurably tainted by the presence of the Bible in the jury room. As we explain more fully below, the premise of the court's refusal to consider an Allen charge further  the ineradicable taint of the Bible  was seriously flawed. The court had assumed an ineradicable taint without pursuing the alternatives, suggested by defense counsel, that might have disproved any such taint or suggested the appropriateness of a curative instruction. In its subsequent written decision denying Lara's motion to dismiss, the court treated the deadlock issue somewhat differently. There, the court concluded that the combination of the reported deadlock and the Bible issues created a manifest necessity for a mistrial. [8] However, if the court was going to give some independent weight to the jury's report of a deadlock (which it did not do when it declared the mistrial), it had to at least explore the alternatives that might have remedied the deadlock or determined its intractable nature. It never did that because of its flawed premise that the Bible taint made it pointless to address the deadlock issue. As a result, the record is insufficient to give any weight to the jury deadlock in the manifest necessity analysis. See United States v. Razmilovic, 507 F.3d 130, 140 (2d Cir.2007) ([W]here the record does not indicate that there was a genuine deadlock, and the court has not provided an explanation for its conclusion or pointed to factors that might not be adequately reflected on a cold record, we are unable to satisfy ourselves that the trial judge exercised 'sound discretion' in declaring a mistrial.) Accordingly, the correctness of the court's manifest necessity determination turns on the necessity of the court's mistrial declaration as a response to the presence of a Bible in the jury room during deliberations.