Opinion ID: 2993622
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Prosecution’s Impermissible Statements

Text: The government crossed the line between permissible commentary on Flores’s testimony about her Facebook messages and that which we have long deemed impermissible. In a message dated June 21, 2012, Flores’s friend asked if she “carried some pot,” to which Flores responded, “yes.”5 In a second pair of June 21 messages, Flores says to a different friend, “come over and have a smoke” “of what I’m bringing.”6 Flores testified that these messages meant that she was bringing marijuana to Mexico and argued that they did not prove that she imported marijuana as charged. The government characterized these messages differently: You heard about some posts on [Flores’s] Facebook account from June 21st 2012 when she said she was carrying marijuana and bringing marijuana. You know what she was carrying on June 21st 2012. She was carrying and bringing marijuana from Mexico into the United States in her car. She tried to convince you. She tried to explain this away. She said, No. No. What I was doing was bringing marijuana from the United States of America into Mexico. 5 The Facebook postings are in Spanish, which the government translated for the jury. Flores translates the conversation differently, asserting that the question was, “Did you take weed.” 6 Flores also translates this conversation differently, asserting that the invitation was to “come so you can smoke out of what I have.” UNITED STATES V. FLORES 9 This argument reflects the government’s apparent strategy for using the Facebook messages to convince the jury that Flores (1) admitted to carrying drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border, and (2) was lying about the direction she carried the drugs. Both parts of this strategy are permissible. Prosecutors are free in argument to suggest that the jury draw reasonable inferences from the evidence presented at trial. United States v. Sayetsitty, 107 F.3d 1405, 1409 (9th Cir. 1997); see also Mageno, 762 F.3d at 943; United States v. Molina, 934 F.2d 1440, 1445 (9th Cir. 1991) (holding that prosecutors may argue that a defendant is lying). Here, there was more than enough evidence to support a reasonable inference that the Facebook messages actually meant that Flores was carrying drugs into the United States, rather than to Mexico as she testified. She was, in fact, carrying more than 36 pounds of marijuana in her car as she entered the United States on the very day she sent those messages. She then attempted to delete postings on her Facebook account from jail after the border patrol discovered the marijuana in her car. Of course, the jury was free to believe Flores’s explanation that the messages actually referenced exportation rather than importation, but the evidence adequately supported the government’s characterization of them. Even if we were to accept that those messages conveyed a desire to smoke marijuana in Mexico, nothing in them rules out the possibility that Flores was offering her friends an opportunity to smoke some of the more than 36 pounds of marijuana she picked up in Mexico before she carried it back to the United States. The latter possibility is all the more plausible because when Flores was arrested, she was not carrying any marijuana other than that found hidden in her car. This evidence supports the permissible inference the government asked the 10 UNITED STATES V. FLORES jury to draw—namely, that the Facebook messages referenced the very marijuana found in Flores’s car. This prosecutorial argument also accurately characterized Flores’s insistence that she carried drugs to Mexico but not to the United States. So long as the government accurately recounted what Flores said—and in the statement quoted above, it did—the government was free to ask the jury to disbelieve Flores. Further, the argument accurately states the law by explaining that Flores is guilty because, regardless of her Facebook postings and what she testified about them, Flores brought drugs into the United States. However, the government also strayed beyond the boundaries of permissible questioning and argument. The prosecutor repeatedly asserted that Flores had admitted to “drug smuggling.” As a legal but irrelevant matter, Flores did admit to drug smuggling, see 21 U.S.C. § 960—just not the kind of drug smuggling with which she was charged, which the prosecutor had to know. Labeling Flores an “admitted drug smuggler” when she actually admitted to exportation required the government to walk a very fine line. It was “definitely improper” for the prosecutor to suggest that Flores admitted to “drug smuggling” when the prosecutor used the term as a synonym for importation because that misstated Flores’s testimony. See United States v. Kojayan, 8 F.3d at 1321; see also Mageno, 762 F.3d at 943. At the same time, when loosely referencing “drug smuggling” to encompass exportation, the government could, without misstating testimony, assert that Flores admitted to drug smuggling. However, it was improper to use the “admission to drug smuggling” lingo in this loose manner when suggesting that such an admission was sufficient to warrant a conviction for the crime charged. Doing so misstates the law, because UNITED STATES V. FLORES 11 Flores was not charged with exportation—the only form of drug smuggling to which she actually admitted. The prosecutor improperly used the phrase “drug smuggling” as a synonym for importation frequently, from her opening statement through her last closing line to the jury. The government’s arguments that Flores admitted to drug smuggling at trial were therefore misleading, if not outright false. These misstatements became flat falsehoods with the prosecutor’s coup de grace: “She knows she was smuggling drugs on June 21st, 2012. You heard her say that repeatedly and that’s why she’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.” The jurors knew this was an importation case, so the only way Flores’s admission to “drug smuggling” would be a basis for finding her guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is if she had admitted to importation. Because she never made such an admission at trial, this statement falsely characterized Flores’s testimony. Moreover, to the extent that the prosecutor did not misrepresent Flores’s testimony, she misstated the law. Flores admitted at trial to exportation. She therefore could be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt based on this admission only if exportation were adequate to support a conviction. Because Flores was on trial for importation, however, the argument that knowingly exporting marijuana was sufficient to support a guilty verdict misstated the law. The prosecutor also improperly invited the jury to convict Flores based on exportation rather than importation during cross-examination. After Flores admitted to carrying drugs into Mexico, the prosecutor asked, “That was illegal, wasn’t it?” Similarly, in closing, the prosecutor acknowledged that Flores “claimed she had smuggled drugs from the United 12 UNITED STATES V. FLORES States to Mexico,” then asserted, “[t]hat’s still smuggling drugs.” These statements are not technically untrue, as exportation is drug smuggling and is illegal. By specifically emphasizing the illegality of exportation, however, the government suggested that even if the jury believed that Flores only exported drugs, she “still” acted illegally. In doing so, the prosecutor overstepped by inviting the jury to improperly convict Flores based on exportation. The prosecutor made this worse by purposefully blurring and minimizing the distinction between importation and exportation. During cross-examination, the prosecutor asked whether Flores carried drugs “between” the United States and Mexico and “across” the border, without specifying a direction. In closing, the prosecutor then characterized a dispute over which direction the drugs traveled as a mere “quibble[],” minimizing the significance of that disputed fact. These statements, while again not untrue as an abstract legal matter, furthered the misimpression that the jury could convict Flores based on exportation. The government should have been much more cautious in brandishing the potentially misleading label of “admitted drug smuggler.” Had the government carefully and accurately used the term, it may have been able to avoid misstating the law or the facts. But the government was unable to do so, and in any event should not have tried to “push the envelope” in this manner. Ruiz, 710 F.3d at 1087 (Pregerson, J., concurring). As the Supreme Court has said, “[t]he United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose . . . interest . . . in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.” Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88 (1935). UNITED STATES V. FLORES 13