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606—OPINION ILLINOIS v. ALLEN 5 course for the trial judge was to have restrained the defendant by whatever means necessary, even if those means included his being shackled and gagged.” 413 F. 2d, at 235. The Court of Appeals felt that the defendant’s Sixth Amendinent right to be present at his own trial was so “absolute” that, no matter how unruly or disruptive the defendant’s conduct might be, he could never be held to have lost that right so long as he continued to insist upon it, as Allen clearly did. Therefore the Court of Appeals concluded that a trial judge could never expel a defendant from his own trial and that the judge's ulti- mate remedy when faced with an obstreperous defendant like Allen who determines to make his trial inpossible is to bind and gag him,’ We cannot agree that the Sixth Amendment, the cases upon which the Court of Appeals relied, or any other cases of this Court so handi- cap a trial judge in conducting a criminal trial. The broad dicta in Hoyt v. Utah, supra, and Lewis v. United States, 146 U. S. 370 (1892), that a trial can never con- tinue in the defendant's absence has been expressly rejected. Diaz v. United States, 223 U. S. 442 (1912). We accept instead the statement of Mr. Justice Cardozo who, speaking for the Court in Snyder v. Massachusetts, 291 U.S. 97, 106 (1938), said: “No doubt the privilege {of personally confronting witnesses] may be lost by consent or at times even by misconduct.”? Although mindful that courts must indulge every reasriable pre- 2¥n a footnote the Court of Appcals also referred to the trial judge’s contempt power. This subject is discussed in Part II of this opinion. Jnfra, at 7-S. * Rule 43 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure provides that “[i]n prosecutions for offenses not punishable by death, the defendant's voluntary absence after the trial has been com- menced in his presence shall not prevent continuing the trial to and including the return of the verdict.”