Opinion ID: 1857143
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Jeff tell us the truth, tell us the truth.

Text: The Court of Criminal Appeals addressed the issue whether the prosecutor's use of these words violated Land's constitutional rights, and that court found no error, plain or otherwise. That court held there was no chance that the jury could have understood the comment to be a reference to Land's failure to testify. Land, 678 So.2d at 218. We agree. In the first part of the prosecutor's rebuttal closing, he simply quoted or paraphrased statements Land had made to the police and statements the police had made to Land while he was being interrogated. It is clear that the prosecutor's discourse was nothing more than a story of the evidence told to the jury by the prosecutor's switching back and forth, speaking as Land, as the police, as a witness, and as the prosecutor himself. The Court of Criminal Appeals correctly held that the remark was not a comment on the appellant's failure to testify, but a comment on the appellant's failure to tell the truth in his statement to the police. Land, 678 So.2d at 217. In the context of the prosecutor's entire closing statement, the jury could not have construed the words Jeff tell us the truth, tell us the truth, to be anything other than a narration of what the police had said to Land when his initial statement conflicted with known facts. There was no error in the prosecutor's use of those words. 2.  Through his attorneys he continues to say `I don't know anything about the wire cutters or the phone lines or the glass fragments, I don't know anything about the gun or how that bullet got into her head.' These words, also part of the prosecutor's rebuttal closing argument, followed his discussion of various statements that Land's counsel had made during closing argument. Land's counsel had attacked the credibility of the evidence presented by the State's expert witnesses, including testimony regarding the tennis-shoe footprint similar to Land's found on a pane of glass, the procedure used to compare the cut made by Land's wire cutters to the cut made on the telephone wire, the procedures used to analyze evidence for a blood type and DNA match, the match of a bullet fired from Land's gun to the bullet retrieved from the victim's body, and the match of two types of glass found on Land's gloves with the window glass in the victim's car and house. We disapprove of a statement by a prosecutor referring the jury to the fact that the defendant spoke through his attorneys, i.e., that he did not speak for himself. Thus, if Land's counsel had made a contemporaneous objection to this statement, and we were to apply the Beecher standard explained above, we might have held the comment to be reversible error. This is true even though it is clear to this Court that, when viewed in the context of the confrontational nature of closing arguments, the prosecutor's comment was intended as a reply in kind to the argument made by Land's counsel. However, the comment was not objected to during trial. Thus, the statement may be considered only by the standard of the plain error rule. Under that standard, given the evidence presented in this case, we find no plain error in the prosecutor's statement. [2]