Opinion ID: 1615498
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Deterring a Prosecutor's Improper Argument

Text: Courts and legal scholars have struggled with how to effectively address improper prosecutorial forensics. Some might argue that appellate courts' seemingly more temperate view toward personal attacks has encouraged prosecutors to take more chances and trial courts to see less need to strongly intervene because of a belief that prejudice will seldom be found. One court has said: [A]lthough we confess our inadequacy to probe the mental processes of counsel, we would be less than realistic if we did not recognize (without regard to the case before us) that sometimes counsel, encouraged by the demonstrated reluctance of courts to declare mistrials or grant new trials for improper argument, deliberately transcend the bounds of legitimate argument, conscious of the possibility that objection may be made and sustained, but smug in the knowledge that the objectionable matters may not be effectively withdrawn and that their poisonous influence may not be entirely neutralized. Hildreth v. Key, 341 S.W.2d 601, 616 (Mo. App.1960). In other words, the risk is minimal and deemed worth taking. Professor Albert W. Alschuler wrote in 1972 that he and others over a twenty-year period had not uncovered a single case in which a prosecutor had been disciplined for forensic misconduct. Albert W. Alschuler, Courtroom Misconduct by Prosecutors and Trial Judges, 50 Tex. L.Rev. 629, 670-71 (1972). Professor Alschuler also found in his own study and that of another law school not a single contempt citation of a prosecutor for forensic misconduct. Id. at 674. The only realistic deterrent to improper conduct is through the trial and appellate courts.