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Parties Involved:
Edward Maddox
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued September 10, 1998 Decided October 9, 1998

No. 97-3082

United States of America,

Appellee

v.

Edward Maddox,

Appellant

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(96cr00151-01)

Lisa B. Wright, Assistant Federal Public Defender, argued

the cause for appellant. With her on the briefs was A.J.

Kramer, Federal Public Defender. Neil H. Jaffee, Assistant

Federal Public Defender, entered an appearance.

Chrisellen R. Kolb, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the

cause for appellee. With her on the brief were Wilma A.

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Lewis, U.S. Attorney, John R. Fisher, Thomas J. Tourish,

Jr., and Mary B. Murphy, Assistant U.S. Attorneys.

Before: Silberman, Randolph, and Garland, Circuit

Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge Randolph.

Randolph, Circuit Judge: The principal issue in this appeal

is whether the conviction of Edward Maddox, after a jury

trial, for unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon (18

U.S.C. s 922(g)) should be set aside because of the prosecutor's improper closing argument.

Maddox's trial lasted less than an hour. The government

presented one witness, the defense none. Officer Riddle

testified that he and six other officers drove in three police

cars to an area known for narcotics trafficking and violence.

Riddle said he spotted Maddox and two other men at the end

of a cul-de-sac. As the cars approached, the men dispersed.

Maddox began walking through a parking lot, towards the

street. Riddle testified that he saw Maddox drop something

shiny. With Maddox only a few feet away, Riddle left his car

and retrieved the object--a key on a key ring with the

insignia of the Enterprise car rental company. Riddle looked

over the cars in the lot, matched the key to an unlocked

Mazda 626 and proceeded to search the car. Under the

driver's seat, he discovered a loaded 9 mm. semi-automatic

pistol; in the glove compartment, he found several signed

Enterprise rental agreements for the car naming Maddox as

the lessee; in the console between the two front seats he

found Maddox's driver's license.

Cross-examination of Riddle revealed that no fingerprints

were found on the pistol; that no one took fingerprints from

the inside of the car; that Riddle never saw Maddox in the

car; that the key and key ring had "not been preserved as

evidence" (Tr. 122); and that at the time Riddle said he was

retrieving the key ring, most of the other six officers had

already gotten out of their cars. Defense counsel also sought

to impeach Riddle with a prior inconsistent statement regarding whether he had instructed Maddox to "stop."

The prosecution and defense had entered into three stipulations, which the prosecutor read to the jury at the close of the

evidence: the Enterprise leasing agreements found in the car

were true and accurate copies of records maintained in the

regular course of business; the pistol had been manufactured

in Massachusetts; and Maddox had a prior conviction for a

crime punishable by imprisonment for more than a year.

In her closing argument, the prosecutor told the jury:

[PROSECUTOR:] Where are the keys? Are the keys

the key to the case? No. If your car gets stolen and

somebody comes to me and tells me I need to prosecute

the person who stole my car, and we find a guy driving

your car, ladies and gentlemen, is the suggestion that I

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need to impound your car for a year until we get around

to trying the case? No, ladies and gentlemen. You give

the property back to its rightful owner.

[DEFENSE COUNSEL]: Objection, Your Honor.

There is no evidence of that.

THE COURT: Overruled.

[PROSECUTOR]: You give the property back to its

rightful owner. And why? Enterprise rental owned

that car. It went back to its owner, ladies and gentlemen.

The district court erred in overruling the objection. The

prosecution had introduced no evidence regarding what happened to the car and to the key and key ring after Maddox's

arrest. We have held many times before, and we hold once

again, that in closing argument counsel may not refer to, or

rely upon, evidence unless the trial court has admitted it.

See, e.g., United States v. Small, 74 F.3d 1276, 1280 (D.C. Cir.

1996); United States v. Boyd, 54 F.3d 868, 871 (D.C. Cir.

1995); United States v. Foster, 982 F.2d 551, 555 (D.C. Cir.

1993); United States v. Teffera, 985 F.2d 1082, 1088, 1089 n.6

(D.C. Cir. 1993). The reasons are obvious. The practice

disregards, indeed violates, the rules governing the admission

of evidence. Typically, the attorney's statements amount to

blatant hearsay about matters not in the record. The transUSCA Case #97-3082 Document #388306 Filed: 10/09/1998 Page 3 of 7
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gressing attorney makes himself an unsworn witness. And

when it is the prosecutor who goes outside the record, the

effect is to deprive the defendant of his right to cross-examine

the witnesses against him. See Wayne R. LaFave & Jerold

H. Israel, Criminal Procedure s 24.5 (2d ed. 1992).

None of what we have written thus far is meant to preclude

prosecutors (or defense counsel) from referring to matters of

common public knowledge or human experience. But the

prosecutor's statements in this case were of a different sort.

It is not common knowledge, and for all we know it may not

even be true, that the police customarily return car keys

having evidentiary value to the owners of the cars. It seems

far more likely that the police would retain the key pending

trial and give the owner a duplicate if one were needed. At

any rate, the prosecutor's representations went beyond anything amounting to common understanding. She tried to

convince the jury that the key to this particular rental car had

been returned to the Enterprise rental company, a matter

unsupported by any evidence. And the prosecutor doubtless

employed this tactic because, an hour earlier, defense counsel's opening statement stressed the fact that the key was

missing.

Still, if this had been the prosecutor's only misstep we

would be inclined to sustain the conviction. The defense

never disputed that officer Riddle seized a key to the Mazda

and, given the rental agreements designating Maddox as the

lessee, it seems beyond doubt that the key came from the

defendant. The prosecutor's improper remarks had the effect of diminishing the value of the missing evidence instruction the trial judge gave to the jury--that they were permitted to draw an adverse inference from the government's

failure to produce the key and key ring. But we cannot see

how the instruction would have been of much assistance to

the defense even if the prosecutor had confined her summation to the evidence.

After the prosecutor finished, defense counsel addressed

the jury. Making the most of the little he had to work with,

counsel attacked Riddle's testimony about the defendant's

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dropping of the key ring. This was a critical piece of

evidence. It tended to show the defendant's guilty knowledge: Maddox must have discarded the key because he knew

the car contained something incriminating, something he did

not want the police to discover. Unless the jury disbelieved

officer Riddle on this subject, defense counsel had no prospect of convincing the jury--as he attempted to do--that

because the car was unlocked in an area notorious for crime,

anyone could have placed the pistol under the seat without

Maddox knowing it, or that someone else could have been

using the car after borrowing it from Maddox. And so

defense counsel pounded away:

Mr. Maddox doesn't go away from the police.... What

does he do? What does the person do that has the keys

to the rental car, the keys that you don't have? What

does he do? He walks right towards the police and

drops them essentially right in front of the police. It is

simply preposterous, ladies and gentlemen. It is simply

preposterous. It did not happen. It did not happen. It

is not corroborated by any testimony whatsoever. Why?

Well, there is only one person who testified.

Shortly into her rebuttal, the prosecutor countered:

If [defense counsel] for one minute believed that these

names over here, that these officers--Royster, Queen,

Latson, McGee, Littlejohn and Jones--what is the matter with the government, why didn't they ... take up

three days of your time and call every one of these

officers and make them say the same thing up there and

make you guys stay here longer?

[DEFENSE COUNSEL]: Objection, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Overruled.

[PROSECUTOR]: Why didn't they do that? You should

infer that they've got something to hide because they

didn't call those people, [defense counsel] says. Well,

Edward Maddox doesn't have any obligation to call a

case, but, ladies and gentlemen, use your common sense.

If [defense counsel] believed that any of those officers,

whose names he knew--if he thought any of those officers would contradict what Investigator Riddle said, do

you think you would have heard from them? You heard

nothing contradicting that officer's testimony because I

submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that nobody's testimony would have. And hearing four days' worth of the

same thing may have been exciting for some of you, but I

doubt it.

In other words, each of the other six officers would have

confirmed what Riddle had told the jury; and the jurors

could thank the prosecutor for not calling those officers to the

stand and wasting three or four days of the jurors' valuable

time.

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The prosecutor crossed well over the line between the

permissible and the impermissible, as the government now

admits. Why the district court refused to sustain the defense

objection is beyond us. When a prosecutor starts telling the

jury about what other potential witnesses would have said if

the government had only called them, it is time not merely to

sustain an objection but to issue a stern rebuke and a curative

instruction, or if there can be no cure, to entertain a motion

for a mistrial. That the trial was so short and so simple

made the prosecutor's improper remarks all the more potent.

Contrast Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, 416 U.S. 637, 645 (1974);

Brecht v. Abrahamson, 507 U.S. 619, 639 (1993). The defense

had attacked Riddle's credibility, especially his testimony

about the dropping of the key. Yet the prosecutor's rebuttal

improperly propelled the jury into believing everything Riddle had told them. How could the jury disbelieve Riddle

when a half-dozen other officers on the scene agreed entirely

with his version of the events? The judge's refusal to sustain

the objection, done in open court, only made matters worse.

Jurors unschooled in the proprieties of closing argument may

have thought the defense was objecting to the accuracy of the

prosecutor's representations. If so, the court's overruling of

the objection signified that the prosecutor had correctly described what the missing witnesses would attest. Maddox did

not mount much of a defense, but he was entitled to present

his case to the jury without the extra burden of having to

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overcome six additional adverse witnesses at a point when the

evidence had closed. The right to cross-examine is a "substantial" right of every defendant. The law requires us to

disregard errors and irregularities that do "not affect substantial rights," Fed. R. Crim. P. 52(a); 28 U.S.C. s 2111, but

the errors of the trial judge and the prosecutor are not of

that sort. Can we be sure that the prosecutor's improper

rebuttal and the court's erroneous overruling of the defense

objection "did not influence the jury" or had only a "very

slight effect"? Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 764-

65 (1946). No, we cannot be sure of any such thing. It may

well be that in a trial uninfected by the sort of overreaching

that took place here, Maddox would have been convicted.

But that is not the correct harmless-error inquiry. See

United States v. Smart, 98 F.3d 1379, 1391 (D.C. Cir. 1996);

see also Harry T. Edwards, To Err is Human, But Not

Always Harmless: When Should Legal Error Be Tolerated?,

70 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1167, 1199-1206 (1995). The question is

"whether the guilty verdict actually rendered in this trial was

surely unattributable to the error," Sullivan v. Louisiana,

508 U.S. 275, 279 (1993), and because that question must be

answered in the negative, the defendant's conviction cannot

stand. The judgment of conviction is reversed and the case is

remanded for a new trial.

So ordered.

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