Mayfield v. State

¶1concurring.

¶2A jury must be “free to act and free from any seeming or real coercion on the part of the [trial] court.”5 “Each juror has the right to form his own conviction. He is not required to surrender it because he is in the minority. He is not required to agree with the majority rather than cause a mistrial.”6 A trial court should take steps to avoid suggesting (either explicitly or implicitly) to a jury that one or more of it members should surrender his or her beliefs, as under the law a juror has an unfettered right to hold fast to his convictions and is not required to surrender them simply because he is in the minority.7

¶3In this case, I agree with the majority that the trial court’s actions were not improperly coercive and did not ultimately suggest that an individual juror should align his convictions with the rest of the jury. However, I write separately to caution that trial courts should proceed with extreme caution when confronted with the possibility of a recalcitrant juror. The practice of singling out an individual juror, such as occurred here, is especially dangerous, as it may be misconstrued as an effort to coerce or even intimidate the juror into surrendering his or her personal convictions. As noted by the Court of Appeals, for a trial court “to call in a single juror is an unwise practice fraught with possibilities of inviting trouble and . . . the better *332procedure is [always] to summon the entire jury”8 when confronted with this sort of situation.