Opinion ID: 2509517
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Prosecutor's Comments in Closing Argument About Dr. Hatcher's Testimony

Text: As noted earlier, Dr. Chris Hatcher testified about the kind of person who would commit the crimes charged in this case. We concluded that the jury could infer that defendant was such a person. ( Ante, 25 Cal.Rptr.3d at 569-570, 107 P.3d at 242.) In his closing argument to the jury, the prosecutor asked: Now, what were the inferences we can draw from Dr. Hatcher's testimony about the defendant's motive? (Italics added.) He then made a series of assertions prefixed with the phrase we know: we know that defendant handcuffed and gagged the victim for sexual pleasure; we know that he enjoyed seeing the victim struggle for life; we know that he sodomized and strangled the victim for purposes of sexual pleasure and to produce both terror and struggle. Defendant objected, pointing out that Dr. Hatcher had described a hypothetical perpetrator. The trial court overruled the objection. The prosecutor then resumed his argument by asking the jury again what inferences could be drawn from Dr. Hatcher's testimony. Literally speaking, the prosecutor's argument may have misstated the evidence. We  a term that presumably encompassed at least the prosecutor and the jurors  did not know defendant's motivation and feelings. We could only infer them from Dr. Hatcher's testimony. But this overstatement of the evidence is insignificant, because the prosecutor's argument, taken as a whole, made it clear that he was not talking about proven facts, but about inferences that the jury could draw from Dr. Hatcher's description of the kind of person who commits crimes such as those here. Thus, even assuming that the trial court should have sustained defendant's objection, any error in not doing so would be harmless.