Opinion ID: 3064455
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Alleged coerciveness of the instruction

Text: [9] DeWeaver argues that the “chocolate cake caper” instruction was so coercive that it constituted directing a verdict. “Any criminal defendant . . . being tried by a jury is entitled to the uncoerced verdict of that body.” Lowenfield v. Phelps, 484 U.S. 231, 241 (1988). Thus, an instruction is unconstitutionally coercive if it denies a defendant the due process right to a trial by a fair and impartial jury. See id. That right is not violated when the judge gives a so-called Allen charge, named for Allen v. United States, 164 U.S. 492, 50102 (1896), which encourages a dissenting juror to give weight to the views of the majority. To determine whether an instruction is coercive, the Court “consider[s] the supplemental charge given by the trial court in its context and under all the circumstances.’ ” Lowenfield, 484 U.S. at 237 (quoting Jenkins v. United States, 380 U.S. 445, 446 (1965) (per curiam)). 2220 DEWEAVER v. RUNNELS In a case similar to this one, Early v. Packer, 537 U.S. 3 (2002), the Supreme Court reversed a grant of habeas, determining that the California court had reasonably concluded an instruction was not coercive. In that case, the jury deliberated for 28 hours before one juror asked to be removed from the jury. The foreperson accused that juror of failing to deliberate in a note that said, “nearly all my fellow jurors questio[n] her ability to understand the rules and her ability to reason.” Id. at 4. The court read that note aloud to the entire jury, instructed it that the one juror had the right to disagree with the rest of the jurors, inquired as to the latest vote count, and admonished the jury to consider the law as instructed and the facts as they found them. The next day, the one juror again asked to be removed, but the court insisted she continue trying to deliberate. The jury returned a guilty verdict after two more days of deliberation. Id. at 4-6. The Supreme Court upheld the state appellate court’s determination that no coercion had occurred, concluding that it was neither contrary to nor an unreasonable application of Supreme Court precedent. Id. at 11. In many ways, the facts of this case are not sufficiently distinguishable from those in Early to warrant a different result. Although DeWeaver argues that the state court ignored how the trial court singled out the holdout juror and inquired into the deliberative process, the trial court in this case did no more in that regard than the court in Early. The only distinction between the two cases is the forty-five minute “chocolate cake caper” instruction, which the state appellate court concluded was prosecutorially slanted because it only presented hypothetical situations in which the suspect was guilty.4 The 4 DeWeaver also argues that the state court improperly applied harmless error analysis to this instruction, alleging that the error was structural. DeWeaver does not argue that a prosecutorial slant alone is structural error but that a coercive jury instruction would be structural error. Because we conclude that the state court reasonably determined that the instruction was not coercive, we do not reach the question of whether a coercive instruction would be structural error. DEWEAVER v. RUNNELS 2221 state appellate court considered the instruction an attempt to respond to the jury’s concerns and questions about the law, lauding its goal of explaining the law in an understandable manner while warning that such explanations must be evenly balanced. The court concluded that the instruction properly stated the law and, most importantly, that it did not deprive DeWeaver of his right to a fair trial. DeWeaver, 2001 WL 1515830, at -11. [10] Although the state court performed its fair-trial analysis in the context of harmless error, its analysis was consistent with Lowenfield, in which the Court describes an unconstitutionally coercive jury instruction as one that deprives a defendant of due process. 484 U.S. at 241. The state appellate court properly considered the totality of the circumstances surrounding the trial judge’s interactions with the jury, empha- sizing that the trial judge correctly instructed the jury on the law, advised the jury not to use the instruction as a comment on the evidence, and employed hypothetical facts very different from the facts of the shootings. DeWeaver, 2001 WL 1515830, at . Neither the court’s reasoning nor result were contrary to Supreme Court precedent; therefore, we must let the state court’s decision stand. See Early, 537 U.S. at 8.