Court Opinion

ID: 9467028
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:36:04.963269+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:06.569960
License: Public Domain

BRIGHT, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I respectfully dissent.
The majority in this case holds that an inquiry by a state court judge into the numerical division of an undischarged jury does not violate due process. In my view, this holding contravenes the explicit language of Brasfield v. United States, 272 U.S. 448, 47 S.Ct. 135, 71 L.Ed. 345 (1926), wherein the Supreme Court held that “it [is] essential to the fair and impartial conduct of the trial, that the inquiry itself should be regarded as ground for reversal.” Id. at 450, 47 S.Ct. at 135, 71 L.Ed. 345.
The majority decides that the holding in Brasfield does not apply to the case at hand because it represents only an exercise of the Court’s supervisory power over the lower federal courts. Admittedly, the question of Brasfield’s constitutional grounding is not free from doubt, for the Court did not specify the source of its authority. Yet the Court employed language that sweeps broadly and closely resembles that found in other due process holdings, notably those that have extended federal constitutional guarantees to the states via the fourteenth amendment. E. g., Gideon v. Wainwright, 372 U.S. 335, 342, 83 S.Ct. 792, 795, 9 L.Ed.2d 799 (1963) (right to counsel is “fundamental and essential to a fair trial”); Duncan v. Louisiana, 391 U.S. 145, 149, 88 S.Ct. 1444, 1447, 20 L.Ed.2d 491 (1968) (“trial by jury in criminal cases is fundamental to the American scheme of justice”).1 In my view, the due process clause (read in conjunction with the right to jury trial) clearly prohibits judicial coercion of a jury.2 Given the Court’s empirical determination in Brasfield that a numerical inquiry is inherently coercive, the Constitution not only supports, the holding in that case but also requires the same result here.
Apart from the force of the Court’s language in Brasfield, I believe that the majority’s attempt to examine “the totality of the circumstances” in this case raises serious problems. The majority essays to discover the effects on the jury of the judge’s inquiry and Allen charge even though, as the Court aptly noted in Brasfield, the determining factors often “cannot properly be known to the trial judge or to the appellate courts.” Brasfield v. United States, supra, 272 U.S. at 450, 47 S.Ct. at 136, 71 L.Ed. 345. It follows that the court is inextricably drawn into a thicket where it lacks any reliable map or compass. Cf. Jenkins v. United States, 380 U.S. 445, 85 S.Ct. 1059, 13 L.Ed.2d 957 (1965) (per curiam) (holding that, under all the circumstances, a supplemental instruction that the jury must reach a verdict was coercive); Jones v. Norvell, 472 F.2d 1185 (6th Cir.), cert. denied, 411 U.S. 986, 93 S.Ct. 2275, 36 L.Ed.2d 964 (1973) (holding that under all the circumstances, a state judge’s numerical inquiry and Allen charge warranted habeas corpus relief). I would hold that because the judge’s inquiry in this ease was coercive at least in tendency,3 it “is not to be sane*1050tioned.” Brasfíeld v. United States, supra, 272 U.S. at 450, 47 S.Ct. at 136, 71 L.Ed. 345. Accordingly, I dissent.

. By contrast, the Court has typically exercised its supervisory authority in furtherance of some narrower rule of evidence or procedure. E. g., Mallory v. United States, 354 U.S. 449, 77 S.Ct. 1356, 1 L.Ed.2d 1479 (1957) (preserving Fed.R.Crim.P. 5(a)); United States v. Hale, 422 U.S. 171, 95 S.Ct. 2133, 45 L.Ed.2d 99 (1975) (weighing prejudicial impact of evidence regarding pretrial silence against its probative value); Marshall v. United States, 360 U.S. 310, 79 S.Ct. 1171, 3 L.Ed.2d 1250 (1959) (per curiam) (granting a new trial where excluded prejudicial evidence nonetheless reached members of the jury).

. In the words of Judge Winter, dissenting in Ellis v. Reed, 596 F.2d 1195 (4th Cir.), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 973, 100 S.Ct. 468, 62 L.Ed.2d 388 (1979),
Preservation of the purity of the jury’s deliberations is furtherance of a constitutional objective, not merely the exercise of supervisory power for a desirable but non-constitutional purpose, [Id. at 1202.]