UPDATE (July 2, 2025, 10:43 a.m. ET): On Wednesday, a jury convicted Sean “Diddy” Combs of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution and acquitted him of more serious charges: one count of racketeering and two counts of sex trafficking.
The Sean “Diddy” Combs jury said Tuesday that it reached a verdict on four of the five counts against him, but not on the most complex count of racketeering because there were “jurors with unpersuadable opinions on both sides.” When it came to the remaining count, the prosecution suggested that the judge give the jury a version of an “Allen charge” to help reach a complete verdict, yet the defense objected to doing so.
Understanding what the charge is can help to understand why the parties took different positions. The charge’s name comes from an 1896 Supreme Court case called Allen v. United States, which approved court instruction urging a jury to reach a verdict. But while such a charge — also known as a “dynamite” charge — doesn’t tell the jury what type of verdict to reach, it has nonetheless been criticized as coercive and is even banned in some states.
That doesn’t stop it from being used in Diddy’s federal case in Manhattan. But it hasn’t been deployed yet.
At the end of the day Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian didn’t give an Allen charge, but he did tell the jury to keep deliberating. He left open the possibility of giving some version of the charge if the racketeering stalemate persists as deliberations continue Wednesday. If the jury still can’t reach a full verdict after further deliberation, then the question becomes whether the judge will issue some version of the Allen charge or whether he’ll declare a hung jury on the racketeering count and permit the jury to deliver its verdict on the other charges. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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