Wong v. Smith
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a ruling that threw out a man's sexual-assault conviction because a trial judge's comments to a deadlocked jury were found to be unconstitutionally coercive.
Three justices publicly dissented from that decision, arguing the appeals court had no basis under federal habeas law to second-guess the state court's approval of a long-standing practice allowing judges to comment on the evidence.
How it got here: A federal district court granted habeas relief and the Ninth Circuit affirmed; the state asked the Supreme Court to review that decision, which it declined to do.
The Case in Depth
What happened
Anthony Smith and a codefendant robbed and burglarized a couple's home, and during the crime one of them forced the wife to perform oral sex. Smith was convicted, but jurors initially deadlocked on the sex-assault charge over doubts about DNA evidence. The trial judge then commented on the evidence, highlighting inconsistencies in the defendants' police statements, after which the jury convicted Smith.
The question before the Court
Should the Supreme Court have taken up a case where a federal appeals court found a judge's comments to a deadlocked jury unconstitutionally coercive?
Why it matters
The denial leaves in place a lower-court ruling requiring a new trial for a man convicted of forcible oral copulation, and lets stand a Ninth Circuit decision restricting how far trial judges can go in steering a deadlocked jury toward a particular reading of the evidence, at least within that circuit.
What changes now
Because certiorari was denied, the Supreme Court will not review the case, and the Ninth Circuit's decision granting habeas relief to Smith stands. The state must either retry Smith on the oral-copulation count or release him from that portion of his sentence. The denial sets no binding precedent and leaves the legal question about judicial comment on deadlocked juries unresolved at the Supreme Court level.
What this does not decide
A denial of certiorari is not a ruling on the merits and creates no binding precedent. The Supreme Court did not decide whether the trial judge's comments were actually coercive or whether the common-law practice of judicial comment on evidence is constitutional; it simply chose not to review the Ninth Circuit's decision.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice Alito
“Nothing in this Court’s clearly established law prohibits the trial judge from offering an opinion to a jury that is struggling to reach a verdict.”Alito's core objection to the Ninth Circuit's ruling against the trial judge's comments.
Justice Alito argued the Ninth Circuit had no basis under AEDPA's deferential standard to grant habeas relief, because no Supreme Court holding clearly established that a judge's comments on evidence to a deadlocked jury, delivered with cautionary instructions about jurors' fact-finding role, were unconstitutionally coercive. He traced the long common-law tradition of judicial comment on evidence and would have granted certiorari to correct what he saw as the Ninth Circuit's overreach in second-guessing the state court's reasonable application of the law.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- Justice Alito's dissent explained that under federal habeas law (AEDPA), a state court's decision can only be overturned if it unreasonably applied 'clearly established' Supreme Court holdings, not merely if a federal appeals court disagrees with it.
- The dissent noted that the only Supreme Court case addressing coercive jury instructions, Lowenfield v. Phelps, held only that polling a deadlocked jury and giving a modified Allen charge was not unconstitutionally coercive on the facts there, leaving a general and sparse legal standard.
- Because judges have long had common-law authority to comment on the evidence and highlight parts they consider important, and no Supreme Court constitutional decision had ever applied the anticoercion rule to that specific practice, the dissent reasoned that state courts had wide latitude to uphold such comments under the deferential AEDPA standard.
- Applying that latitude, the dissent concluded the trial judge's comments—made after telling jurors they remained the exclusive judges of fact and that his views were advisory only—fell within the traditional, permissible core of judicial comment on the evidence.
- The dissent argued the Ninth Circuit's stricter requirements, such as needing a balanced summary of all evidence or barring encouragement to a deadlocked jury, were not supported by any Supreme Court holding, so the state court's approval of the trial judge's approach was not objectively unreasonable.
Doctrinal impact
Cases affected by this decision
Distinguishes Lowenfield v. Phelps (484 U.S. 231)
Dissent says this is the only relevant precedent, and its narrow holding does not clearly forbid the judge's comments here.