Court Opinion

ID: 9484470
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:54:28.831138+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:50:16.012684
License: Public Domain

WALD, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the panel opinion except as to the characterization of the anti-deadlock charge in Spann’s trial as “unobjectionable,” Panel opinion at 1518-19, free of “any new coercive language,” id. at 1518-19, or “innocent,” id. at 1519 n. 9. I find that the anti-deadlock charge, like the judge’s earlier remarks, included potentially coercive language (including statements that juries “don’t make mistakes,” that no future jury would ever do a better job, and that the judge was “not convinced” that the jury would be “unable to return a unanimous verdict on the single question submitted to [it]”) and that the jury’s lengthy deliberation before the charge followed by its comparatively short deliberation after the charge reinforces the possibility of coercion. See Lowenfield v. Phelps, 484 U.S. 231, 240, 108 S.Ct. 546, 552, 98 L.Ed.2d 568 (1988). The saving grace for the charge was its conscientious, repeated insistence that a juror not surrender an honest conviction. This, in the final analysis, counterbalanced other possibly coercive statements and circumstances surrounding Spann’s conviction.