Court Opinion

ID: 9450481
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 16:50:18.423031+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:32:21.412299
License: Public Domain

JOHN R. BROWN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting in part).
*28I concur fully in the Court's decision and its opinion except as to the Allen charge or the variation in a minor key on Allen as found here.
It is high time we repudiate the use of the Allen charge. It is high time we remove the dynamite as an inducement to the awesome judicial responsibility of a jury verdict on which a man’s life, his liberty, his freedom rests.
For a unanimous Court Judge Wisdom in Green v. United States, 5 Cir., 1962, 309 F.2d 852, 854, condemned its use in virulent terms. Echoing Colorado’s characterization of it as a juridical “third degree,” New Mexico’s description as a “shot gun instruction” and the forthright recognition by the Arizona Supreme Court “that the evils [of its use] far outweigh the benefits * * * ” and the “ * * * decree that its use shall no longer be tolerated and approved * this Court had equally as much to say for itself. “The Allen or ‘dynamite’ charge is designed to blast loose a dead locked jury. There is small, if any, justification for its use. * * * There is no justification whatever for its coercive use. The jury system rests in good part on the assumption that the jurors should deliberate patiently and long, if necessary, and arrive at a verdict — if, but only if, they can do so conscientiously. It is improper for the court to interfere with the jury by pressuring a minority of the jurors to sacrifice their conscientious scruples for the sake of reaching agreement.3 ” 309 F.2d 852, 854.1
The pressures generated by the dynamite charge are out of keeping with that calm, deliberative purpose of a well run, carefully conducted judicial determination of a controversy over which passionate feelings may have been engendered in the community and which inescapably come to the surface now and then in the courtroom as advocates assert their zeal. It may be more sophisticated — and hence more destructive because its invidious impact is not so readily demonstrated — • but in its operative purpose and effect it is the same as the ancient practice — • shocking, but nevertheless legal for its day and time — against which all would now rebel. The Supreme Court of Missouri described it in this fashion in State v. Jeffors, 64 Mo. 376, 381. The “ * * rule at common law * * * authorized the court to confine the jury under strict charge of a bailiff, to be fed on bread and water till the end of a term, unless a verdict was sooner returned; and if a verdict was not then returned, to transport them around the circuit in a cart until they did agree upon a verdict.”
It was the Judges who first thought up the idea of the dynamite charge. It ought to be the Judges who put an end to it in a quick and not too decent a burial.
And in these rites, for the requiem I would take the words of Mr. Justice Clark speaking, not ex cathedra, but rather as Chairman of the Joint Committee for the Effective Administration of Justice delivered on the fiftieth annual meeting of the American Judicature Society August 14, 1963, in the report of that Joint Committee under the title “Progress of Project Effective Justice.” 2 Reporting on the state and regional judge seminars, he first said:
“Our seminars do not attempt the transformation of the judge into a mechanical genius. We do not use Lee Loevinger’s gadget ‘jurimetrics.’ Science may reach the moon but it will never reach the jury. It still takes more than ‘symbolic logic’ to do that. It takes an effective coun*29sel with a competent judge presiding.”
The Justice then concluded:
“Nor do we circulate the ‘Allen charge’ to the new judges as I used to do when heading up the criminal division in the Department of Justice. Allen is dead and we do not believe in dead law.”

. In note 3 Judge Wisdom, using figurative terminology of the Louisiana Bar, stated that the “organ .of the Court agrees with the views expressed hy Judge Brown, dissenting in Huffman v. United States, 5 Cir., 1962, 297 F.2d 754, 759.” There then followed an extensive quotation from my former dissent. Since I was a member of that panel with Judge Wisdom, it means that at least for that ease, the majority of the Court approved these strictures against its use.

. Journal of the American Judicature Society, Vol. 27, No. 5, October 1963, p. 88 at 90.