As the jury in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial remains deadlocked, Judge William Sullivan has issued a Tuey-Rodriguez instruction, commonly known as a “dynamite charge”, in order to break the impasse and avoid a mistrial.
The Tuey-Rodriguez instruction is a special judicial directive given in case of deadlocked juries. It aims at encouraging jurors to continue deliberating by reminding them of their duty to reach a unanimous decision.
The instruction urges jurors to listen to each other’s arguments openly to reassess their own positions, and to consider whether their doubts are reasonable when other equally intelligent jurors who hear the same evidence have reached different conclusions.
Judge Sullivan gave the instruction to the jurors after their second announcement of an inability to reach a unanimous verdict, after about four days of deliberation. “In consulting with one another, you should pay due respect to each other’s views and give ear to each other’s reasoning,” Judge Sullivan said.
The instruction also adds that the jury was drawn from the same pool from which any future jury would be drawn and that there is “no reason to believe that the case will ever be submitted to 12 persons more intelligent, impartial, or better qualified than yourselves to determine it.”
If the jurors are still at a deadlock after the instruction is delivered, the judge would have no choice but to declare a mistrial. This instruction is the same as the one given in the first trial of Karen Read, which resulted in a hung jury. In the case of Clancy, the prosecution would decide whether to pursue a retrial.
As legal scholars point out, a judge can deliver the Tuey-Rodriguez instruction only once or twice because doing so more frequently may come across as “coercion” on the part of the judge.
2026-09-03 01:12:00
