Supreme Court of Georgia Finds Judge's Instructions Were Not Improper "Verdict Urging" to the Jury

When does a judge's pre-deliberations instruction to a jury cross the line from properly managing the business of trial to improper "verdict urging"? That was the question addressed by the Supreme Court of Georgia in its recent opinion in Edwards-Tuggle v. State, 2024 WL 5171482 (Ga. 2024).

In Edwards-Tuggle, the defendant was charged with felony murder and aggravated assault in connection with the shooting death of his stepfather. Just before the jurors retired to deliberate, the judge told the jurors the following:

Folks, as I told you, submitting an important case to both sides at 4:10 on a Friday afternoon before a holiday week is not ideal, but it's still an important case to both sides. My experience is that jury deliberations take a while. That's why we have 12 people. They see it differently. So the intent is to get it right, not go fast. Ordinarily, we would keep you until you reach a verdict. That may or may not be possible today. And then that creates another problem because it's my understanding that there's at least some jurors that may not be available on Monday. See, most of the time I just have you come back the next day. We can no longer open the courtroom on [the weekend] – the building is so huge, there's no way to get the infrastructure in to make it work anymore. There may come a time, if you deliberate into the evening, that you want something to eat. In that regard there, the county authorizes us – how is it we word it? They authorize us to get food from Papa Johns in Lawrenceville....

My point in mentioning that to you is on a Friday, when I have to order food for jurors, it really takes about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes to get it here. So if you decide you want me or you need me to order food for you, build that into your request.

Defense counsel then moved for a mistrial, "argu[ing] that the court's instructions were a form of 'verdict urging' involving a 'time fuse' charge, one that implied a deadline for returning a verdict."

The Supreme Court of Georgia disagreed, concluding that

Viewed in context, the trial judge's remarks about scheduling the jury's deliberations were simply ordinary efforts to manage the business of a trial. Over the course of the trial, the judge kept the jury informed about various expected delays and breaks in the proceedings due to unrelated court matters, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving. The judge told the jury at one point: “I'll try to keep things going, you know, keep us on track....We're not in the go-fast business; we're in the get-it-right business.” On the evening of the day before the case went to the jury, the judge informed the jury that deliberations might be continued into the following week. The judge noted: “Sometimes juries deliberate for days. Sometimes they deliberate [for] a short time. There's no prediction. I just don't want there to be any exigency tied to your time. That's all I try to avoid, so that you can give things your undivided attention.”

With respect to such administrative or trial management instructions, “a broad discretion is vested in the judge below, and that that discretion will not be controlled by this court unless it is manifestly abused.”...The judge's discretion in controlling the conduct of a trial necessarily includes the power to determine the length of time the jury will be allowed to deliberate on a given day....

Given the circumstances of this case, the trial court's remarks about submitting the case on a Friday afternoon, ordering dinner, and possibly continuing into the following week cannot be understood as urging the jury to reach a verdict quickly or setting a deadline for returning a verdict. Rather, the court's statements constituted administrative guidance for the jury concerning how long they would likely be deliberating that evening and in the coming days, guidance that clearly fell within the wide discretion afforded trial judges in managing their courtrooms. Consequently, the appellant has shown no abuse of discretion in the trial court's ruling denying the appellant's motion for a mistrial on this ground.

-CM