Opinion ID: 177231
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 11

Heading: Closing argumentdrug trial

Text: Kinsella also criticizes the prosecutor's drug-trial summation, which, he says, discussed a matter not in evidence namely, that Kinsella had tried to sell OxyContin from jail. Kinsella is right. Discussing the recorded calls from jail, the prosecutor said they showed that Kinsella wanted to off-load Oxy to make bail but there was nothing in the tapes about that. Undaunted, the government tries to soft-pedal this problem by calling the prosecutor's comment ambiguous and reminding us that we cannot carelessly infer that a prosecutor intended an enigmatic remark to have its most damaging meaning. This is just plain wrong. There is no ambiguity in what the prosecutor said (the prosecutor's words could not have been plainer or more explicit), and what he said had no record support. Kinsella's trial lawyer did not object, however, so the plain-error standard again takes center stage. A prosecutor's mission is not simply to rack up victories, but to win fairly, staying well within the rules. United States v. Kojayan, 8 F.3d 1315, 1323 (9th Cir.1993); accord United States v. Rodriguez-Estrada, 877 F.2d 153, 158-59 (1st Cir.1989). Here, the prosecutor strayed into a forbidden zone by discussing something not in evidence. See, e.g., United States v. de Leon Davis, 914 F.2d 340, 345 (1st Cir.1990). But even the plainest of errors requires reversal only if the error caused prejudice and (if not fixed) a miscarriage of justice. See, e.g., United States v. Hilario-Hilario, 529 F.3d 65, 76 (1st Cir.2008). Kinsella can show neither here. Calling the government's case thin, Kinsella contends that the prosecutor's unsupported comment had to have influenced the jury's verdict. But the evidence against himthe controlled drug buys, the phone records, the taped conversations veiled in code, etc., much of which corroborated Hitchcock's accountwas compelling enough. Critically, too, the prosecutor's line-crossing comment was a single unobjected-to sentence from a four-day trial, occurring after Judge Woodcock had told the jurors not to consider counsel's arguments as evidence. Compare United States v. Procopio, 88 F.3d 21, 31 (1st Cir.1996) (explaining that the defense's failure to object may indicate that, in the conditions of the courtroom, the passage in question passed by as mere rhetoric) with United States v. Robinson, 473 F.3d 387, 398 (1st Cir.2007) (noting that the district judge's general instructions that jurors could not consider closing arguments as evidence undercut the defense's plain-error claim). Given all this, we conclude that the prosecutor's improper remark does not merit reversal on plain-error review.