PHILADELPHIA (PA)
Philadelphia Priest Abuse Trial Blog
Ralph Cipriano
Eleven days into deliberations, the jury has told Judge Sarmina that they’re hung on all but one of the counts. Now what?
That doesn’t mean it’s over, because the Court can still give what’s informally known as a “dynamite” charge and try to move the jury to a verdict one way or the other. Under the century-old United States Supreme Court case, Allen v. United States, 164 U.S. 492 (1896), the Court may admonish the jury to keep trying, and can ask jurors to reconsider their positions. In Pennsylvania, the charge is known as a Spencer charge after the main case applying it here, Commonwealth v. Spencer, 442 Pa. 328, 275 A.2d 299 (1971), which incorporated American Bar Association standard 15-5.4. That standard says:
(a) Before the jury retires for deliberation, the court may give an instruction which informs the jury:
(1) that in order to return a verdict, each juror must agree thereto;
(2) that jurors have a duty to consult with one another and to deliberate with a view to reaching an agreement, if it can be done without violence to individual judgment;
(3) that each juror must decide the case for himself or herself but only after an impartial consideration of the evidence with the other jurors;
(4) that in the course of deliberations, a juror should not hesitate to reexamine his or her own views and change an opinion if the juror is convinced it is erroneous; and
(5) that no juror should surrender his or her honest belief as to the weight or effect of the evidence solely because of the opinion of the other jurors, or for the mere purpose of returning a verdict.
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