A Tuey-Rodriguez charge is a Massachusetts jury instruction judges give when jurors report they are deadlocked. Sometimes called a “dynamite charge,” it urges the panel to keep deliberating and carefully weigh one another’s views without abandoning honestly held beliefs just to return a verdict.
The name comes from two Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court cases: Commonwealth v. Tuey (1851) and Commonwealth v. Rodriguez (1973), which refined the wording so it does not pressure holdout jurors. On September 2, 2026, Judge William Sullivan gave the instruction in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial after the jury twice said it could not agree.