Opinion ID: 202977
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Unpreserved Theories.

Text: This leaves the appellant's theories of prosecutorial misconduct and manifest injustice. The appellant failed adequately to raise either of these theories at the trial-court level. His original motion for a new trial did not advert to either theory, and his reply to the government's opposition did not remedy this omission. To be sure, the term prosecutorial misconduct can be found scattered throughout the record below. But these sporadic allusions to prosecutorial misconduct are unaccompanied by any attempt at developed argumentation and are bereft of any citations to relevant authority. They are, therefore, waived. See Paterson-Leitch Co. v. Mass. Mun. Wholesale Elec. Co., 840 F.2d 985, 990 (1st Cir.1988) (One should not be allowed to defeat the system by seeding the record with mysterious references to unpled claims, hoping to set the stage for an ambush should the ensuing ruling fail to suit.); see also Zannino, 895 F.2d at 17. As for manifest injustice (a shorthand for the theory that the district court's supervisory powers should have been exercised to overturn a verdict procured by egregious falsehoods and government misconduct), the appellant's filings below contain not even a glancing mention of this point. A theory that makes its debut in the court of appeals is perforce unpreserved; [i]t is a bedrock rule that when a party has not presented an argument to the district court, she may not unveil it in the court of appeals. United States v. Slade, 980 F.2d 27, 30 (1st Cir.1992).