Opinion ID: 546225
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Improper Prosecutorial Vouching

Text: 106 Based on our review of the trial transcript, it is clear that the success of the government's case hinged on whether the jury believed the testimony of Thomas DelGiorno and Nicholas Caramandi. The thrust of the defense was to attack DelGiorno's and Caramandi's credibility by drawing attention to their extensive criminal histories, to favorable terms of their plea agreements with federal and state authorities, and to prior inconsistent statements they had made at previous trials. All of these were routine impeachment tactics for dealing with turned witnesses. However, defense counsel went further and suggested that federal and state law enforcement officers had fabricated DelGiorno's and Caramandi's testimony. 107 Apart from accusatory remarks in certain opening statements, 52 throughout most of the trial the defense attorneys' allegations of government misconduct were confined to questions posed during the course of rigorous cross-examination of DelGiorno and Caramandi. 53 However, after the government rested, the appellants called DelGiorno's son, Thomas DelGiorno, Jr., who expressly stated that FBI agents and state law enforcement officers had suggested answers to his father while debriefing him: 108 Q: During the period of time you were with your father when he was taken for briefing sessions or to be interviewed by the FBI and/or the State Police, what, if anything, did he say about the manner in which they interviewed him? And let me be specific about that. What did he say occurred when they asked him to recount or to tell them what they knew about a certain incident? What did he say they'd do? 109 A: He told me they would ask him of a certain incident and my father would tell them about the certain incident and the, for instance, they would come back at him and ask him, well, could it have happened this way and my father would say, yeah, it could have happened that way and then by the time they're done of could it happen this way or could it happen that way, my father was actually telling the story that they wanted him to tell. 110 Q: Did he tell you this himself? 111 A: Yes, he did several times. 112 Q: And did he make a comment about that, how that interested him or words of that effect? 113 A: Yeah, he was very interested in the beginning because he really felt that, he couldn't believe that they would do something like this cause, you know, they're federal government or they're Jersey Police or they're government, couldn't believe they actually do something like this. But once he did it several times, I guess he got used to it and he just went on from there. 114 Tr. 11/9/88 at 73-74 (emphasis supplied). 115 In response to this testimony, the government, as part of its rebuttal case, called several law enforcement officers who had been present during DelGiorno's questioning. The officers refuted Thomas DelGiorno, Jr.'s allegations: 116 Q: Were you present when the FBI agents interviewed Thomas DelGiorno? 117 A: Yes, sir, I was. 118 Q: Did you ever hear any of those FBI agents suggest to DelGiorno that he change the answers that he was giving? 119 A: No, sir, I did not. 120 Q: Did you ever hear any of those agents suggest to him that they didn't like his version of the facts and suggested an alternate version of the facts which he could have got, which came from them, the agents, as opposed to from his mouth? 121 A: No, sir, I did not. 122 Q: Ever hear anybody suggest to DelGiorno that he add more defendant [sic] into a particular crime? 123 A: At no time did I ever hear that, no sir. 124 Q: Or say that the defendant who hadn't committed a crime should commit, should be testified to by DelGiorno or said to have committed a crime by DelGiorno? 125 A: No, sir, I did not. 126 Tr. 11/9/88 at 164. 127 In view of these excerpts, it is apparent that at the close of the evidence, the amount of weight the jury would assign to Thomas DelGiorno, Sr.'s testimony depended to a large extent on who the jury found more credible, Thomas DelGiorno, Jr., or the assorted law enforcement officers who flatly denied his allegations of misconduct. 128 Predictably, the integrity of the government in maintaining this prosecution became a central theme in the appellants' closing arguments. We need not recount all of the instances where defense counsel attacked the integrity of the government but will limit our discussion to a few of the more extreme examples cited by the government. Joseph Grande's attorney claimed that DelGiorno's and other witnesses' testimony was completely fabricated by the government: [Y]ou know that [DelGiorno and Caramandi] they're liars, killers, thieves, burglars, flim-flam artists, cheaters, crooks, perjurers.... [T]heir testimony has been colored, it's been nursed, rehearsed, practiced, planned, engineered if you will so that when they testify that they'll appear believable. Tr. 11/15/88 at 26. Philip Leonetti's attorney predicted that DelGiorno and Caramandi would receive lenient sentences because sentencing is to be at the whim and caprice of the prosecutors, who are going to make representations to the sentencing judge. Tr. 11/12/88 at 117. And finally, Scarfo's attorney opined that the prosecutors did not seriously believe that the appellants would be convicted of all charges, 54 and repeatedly suggested that the government had a vendetta against the Mafia which led it to seek the appellants' convictions at any cost. Tr. 11/16/88 at 142-44. In this regard, he analogized the prosecution of the Scarfo family to the government's attempt to bury unions in the 1930's, the internment of the Japanese during World War II, the blacklisting of communists during the McCarthy era, the circumstances leading to the Kent State riots, the persecution of Vietnam protestors, and ultimately, in his piece de resistance, to the Spanish Inquisition. Id. 55 129 Bearing in mind the trial context in which it was made, we turn now to appellants' assault on the prosecutor's rebuttal argument. According to appellants, the prosecutor's vouching took the following forms: 1) references to the moral integrity of law enforcement officers and prosecutors working on the case, together with assertions that because the testifying law enforcement personnel had sworn oaths of office, they would be jeopardizing their careers if, as some defense attorneys claimed, they had scripted Caramandi's and DelGiorno's testimony; 2) suggestions that the prosecutors possessed some means of assessing the truthfulness of Caramandi's and DelGiorno's testimony, independent of the evidence presented at trial; and 3) the prosecutors' personal assurances that the witnesses were telling the truth. Brief for J. Pungitore at 13-14. 130 Appellants point to the following examples of the prosecutor's allegedly improper remarks. In response to defense counsels' claims that FBI agents had scripted DelGiorno's testimony, the prosecutor, in his rebuttal argument, stated: 131 Why bring all those FBI agents and state troopers? I'll tell you why. Because the FBI agents and state troopers in this case are not criminals. There's no evidence to indicate that they're the criminals. There's no evidence that those good men suborned perjury or made up anything and that's why the Government brought them in[,] so that you could judge their credibility from the witness stand. 132 Tr. 11/16/88 at 175-76 (emphasis supplied). 133 The prosecutor also urged the jury to consider that the testifying law enforcement personnel had taken oaths of office when assessing the credibility of Thomas DelGiorno, Jr.'s testimony. 56 134 Finally, appellants rely on the following passage in support of their claim that the prosecutor attested to the integrity of the prosecutorial team and personally vouched for the credibility of DelGiorno and Caramandi: 135 Well, those prosecutors that [defense counsel] was referring to include for the most part us, me, Joe Peters, L[ou]is Pichini, Albert Wicks and Dave Fritchey, who you saw for most of the trial. We're the prosecutors. It's not somebody off in Washington. It's not somebody some place else that you'll never see. We're the ones and make no mistake about it. What he's telling you, what a lot of these defense attorneys are telling you is that we fed this information to those Defendants, and you know what? You've heard us throughout the course of this trial. I'm not a genius but I'm not that dumb that I casually mentioned things to them without knowing exactly what I'm doing. I'm not that stupid. I didn't casually allow Caramandi to know what DelGiorno was saying and allow DelGiorno to know what Caramandi was saying and neither did any of these other prosecutors[,] because they're all at least as smart if not smarter than I am, and you know what? Those FBI agents, those state troopers, those policemen, they're not real stupid either. 136 The only way that Caramandi and DelGiorno's testimony could be consistent in this case is one of two ways. They're either telling the truth or all the prosecutors and law enforcement people or a large percentage of them got together and said to Caramandi, listen, here's what Thomas DelGiorno was telling, the story, here's how he says it and we want you to say it the same way[,] and then we went to DelGiorno and said here's how Caramandi is telling the story. We want you to say it the same way. Now there's been no evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened in this case. In fact, all those law enforcement people who paraded up on the stand in response to some testimony that was inaccurate by the defense that just wasn't so, all those people said it never ever happened and you've got to ask yourselves if all those law enforcement people and we as prosecutors violated our oaths, jeopardized our jobs, our careers, our right to practice law, they're [sic] right to continue as FBI agents, or there's another alternative. The stories of Caramandi and DelGiorno coincide because they are telling the truth, because the evidence indicates ... it.... [T]he only way that they got their stories together is if law enforcement told them each what to say[,] and there is nothing to indicate that that happened, and it didn't happen. 137 Tr. 11/16/88 at 241-43 (emphasis supplied). 138 The district court in its opinion on appellants' post-trial motions decided that to the extent that the prosecution bolstered the credibility of its witnesses, it did so as an appropriate response to defense attacks on the integrity of the prosecution. 711 F.Supp. at 1327. Although appellants concede the government's prerogative to respond to attacks on the credibility of its witnesses, Brief for J. Pungitore at 9, they maintain that the rebuttal argument went beyond the permissible boundaries of fair reply and that the prosecutor engaged in impermissible vouching for the credibility of its witnesses based on evidence outside the record. Thus, they argue, under United States v. DiLoreto, 888 F.2d 996 (3d Cir.1989), decided after the district court released its opinion, the remarks gave rise to per se reversible error. 139 In DiLoreto, various defense counsel argued in closing that key government witnesses were not credible because they were testifying pursuant to favorable plea agreements. 888 F.2d at 998. In response to these contentions, the prosecutor in his rebuttal summation attempted to rehabilitate the witnesses by stating in reference to the plea agreements, If they lie, the bargain is off. That's it, no bargain. We don't take liars. We don't put liars on the stand. We don't do that. Id. at 999. The defendants promptly moved for a mistrial which was denied by the district court. Id. at 998. 140 This court interpreted the prosecutor's comments as an assertion that the government as a matter of policy in the prosecution of its cases, does not use liars as witnesses. Id. at 999. As there was no evidence in the record to support the existence of any such policy, the court concluded that the government had improperly vouched for the credibility of its witnesses based on evidence outside the record. The court held that in such circumstances, improper prosecutorial comments give rise to per se reversible error. Id. at 999. 141 In certain respects, this case is factually distinguishable from DiLoreto, since here, not all of the prosecutorial comments bearing on credibility were lacking in evidentiary support. For example, we do not consider the following statement of the prosecutor to be extra-record vouching within DiLoreto: the only way [DelGiorno and Caramandi] got their stories together is if law enforcement told them each what to say[,] and there is nothing to indicate that that happened, and it didn't happen. In contrast to DiLoreto, this statement does not suggest that the prosecutor had access to undisclosed facts which would support a favorable credibility determination with respect to government witnesses. Rather, the prosecutor merely asked the jury to consider that there were only two logical explanations for consistencies between DelGiorno's and Caramandi's testimony: either law enforcement officials had fabricated their responses or the witnesses were telling the truth. Given that numerous law enforcement officials vehemently denied Thomas DelGiorno Jr.'s account of the debriefing process, we cannot fairly say that the prosecutor reached beyond the record in arguing that the scenario urged by defense counsel in their closing arguments didn't happen. Instead, faced with contradictory testimony regarding the preparation of its witnesses, the prosecutor urged the jury to accept the testimony most favorable to the government. This, in itself, was proper argument. 57 142 However, we do agree with appellants that in other portions of the rebuttal summation, the prosecutor attempted to bolster the credibility of testifying law enforcement personnel and the prosecutorial team by invoking facts which had no foundation in the record. In particular, we observe that there was no evidence backing the prosecutor's comments that the U.S. Attorneys and law enforcement officers could not have behaved as unscrupulously as defense counsel alleged they did without violating their oaths of office and jeopardizing their careers. Even setting aside DiLoreto's strong condemnation of extra-record vouching, we would disapprove of these portions of the prosecutorial argument, as it is inappropriate for a prosecutor to invoke his or her oath of office as a means of defending the credibility of government witnesses. United States v. Torres, 809 F.2d 429, 445, 446 (7th Cir.1987) (Flaum, J., concurring) (prosecutor's claim that his oath of office prevented him from offering perjured testimony placed him in the inappropriate role of a witness); United States v. Saenz, 747 F.2d 930, 942 (5th Cir.1984), cert. denied, 473 U.S. 906, 105 S.Ct. 3531, 87 L.Ed.2d 655 (1985) (prosecutor's insinuation that he only prosecuted the guilty was improper, albeit fair reply to defense attacks on the prosecutor's integrity in maintaining prosecution). See also United States v. Oxman, 740 F.2d 1298, 1303 (3d Cir.1984), vacated and remanded on other grounds sub. nom. United States v. Pflaumer, 473 U.S. 922, 105 S.Ct. 3550, 87 L.Ed.2d 673 (1985) (disapproving of a prosecutor's suggestion that he might be personally disadvantaged if it were determined that a government witness had disregarded the truthful testimony proviso of his plea agreement). While it is unprofessional for any attorney to use his oath of office as a means of enhancing a witness's credibility, it is especially unbefitting for a prosecutor to do so because, as recognized in United States v. Young, the prosecutor's opinion carries with it the imprimatur of the Government and may induce the jury to trust the Government rather than its own view of the evidence. 470 U.S. 1, 18-19, 105 S.Ct. 1038, 1048, 84 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985). See also Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 88, 55 S.Ct. 629, 633, 79 L.Ed. 1314 (1935) (a prosecutor may strike hard blows but he is not at liberty to strike foul ones.). 143 If, as appellants allege, DiLoreto controls, then we would have to reverse their convictions without examining whether the prosecutor's comments caused them any unfair prejudice. However, despite the factual similarities noted above, we do not view DiLoreto as controlling because in this case, unlike in DiLoreto, we may review only for plain error, as appellants failed to preserve their objections to the prosecutor's rebuttal summation. 58 To apply the per se rule established in DiLoreto in the absence of a contemporaneous objection would be completely inconsistent with Young, wherein the Supreme Court opined that a court may never apply a per se reversal rule to a trial defect subject to a plain error standard of review. 470 U.S. at 16 n. 14, 105 S.Ct. at 1047 n. 14 (A per se approach to plain error review is flawed). 144 Thus, we may reverse only if we find an error in the prosecutor's comments so serious as to undermine the fundamental fairness of the trial and contribute to a miscarriage of justice. In this regard, we are mindful of the Supreme Court's admonishment that 145 a criminal conviction is not to be lightly overturned on the basis of a prosecutor's comments standing alone, for the statements or conduct must be viewed in context; only by doing so can it be determined whether the prosecutor's conduct affected the fairness of the trial. 146 Young, 470 U.S. at 11, 105 S.Ct. at 1044. 147 Thus, our objective is not to penalize the prosecutor for an inopportune remark, but to ensure that the appellants received a fair trial. 148 Reviewing the record as a whole, we conclude that a reversal is not warranted because the prosecutor's invocation of the oaths of office taken by the government officials involved in this case fell squarely within the invited response doctrine. United States v. Robinson, 485 U.S. 25, 33 & n. 5, 108 S.Ct. 864, 869 & n. 5, 99 L.Ed.2d 23 (1988); Darden v. Wainwright, 477 U.S. 168, 182, 106 S.Ct. 2464, 2472, 91 L.Ed.2d 144 (1986); Young, 470 U.S. at 12-13, 105 S.Ct. at 1045; Lawn v. United States, 355 U.S. 339, 359 n. 15, 78 S.Ct. 311, 323 n. 15, 2 L.Ed.2d 321 (1958); United States v. DiPasquale, 740 F.2d 1282, 1296 (3d Cir.1984), cert. denied, 469 U.S. 1228, 105 S.Ct. 1226, 84 L.Ed.2d 364 (1985). The doctrine teaches that where a prosecutorial argument has been made in reasonable response to improper attacks by defense counsel, the unfair prejudice flowing from the two arguments may balance each other out, thus obviating the need for a new trial. Young, 470 U.S. at 12-13, 105 S.Ct. at 1045. We have interpreted the doctrine to mean that a prosecutor may neutralize improper defense arguments but may not rely on them as a springboard for the launching of affirmative attacks upon the defendants. DiPasquale, 740 F.2d at 1296 (explaining United States v. Somers, 496 F.2d 723 (3d Cir.), cert. denied, 419 U.S. 832, 95 S.Ct. 56, 42 L.Ed.2d 58 (1974)). In other words, the doctrine's reach is limited to defensive, as opposed to offensive, conduct of the prosecutor. 59 149 We acknowledge that in this case, Thomas DelGiorno Jr.'s testimony provided some evidentiary support for the appellants' challenges to the government's integrity in maintaining this prosecution. However, in analogizing the prosecution to historical persecutions, such as union busting in the 1930's, the internment of the Japanese during World War II, the blacklisting of communists, the harassment of political protestors, and the Spanish Inquisition, the appellants themselves exceeded the boundaries of proper advocacy. 60 150 Furthermore, even if such comments could be excused as rhetorical flourishes, they, along with other assertions made by the appellants, amounted to a personal attack on virtually every government official involved in this case, including members of the prosecutorial team. The rebuttal summation did no more than refute what was an obvious inference from the appellants' closing arguments, namely that the prosecutors and law enforcement officers had engaged in fabrications and misconduct so extreme as to place their careers in jeopardy. In these circumstances, the prosecutor's invocation of the oaths of office cannot be considered anything other than a defensive response to the extremely serious allegations of misconduct made by the appellants. 151 We do not mean to suggest that defendants may not attempt to impugn a witness's credibility through evidence that his testimony was fabricated by unscrupulous government officials. However, when defendants choose to do so, they must confine their arguments to the scope of the evidence they have presented. Thomas DelGiorno Jr.'s testimony in no way justified the vicious assault on the government's integrity made in this case. Of course, closer supervision by the district court or a timely objection by the government might have eliminated the need for the prosecutorial response. Young, 470 U.S. at 13-14, 105 S.Ct. at 1045. However, given that the appellants themselves invited the comments challenged on appeal, we find no plain error requiring reversal of their convictions.