Opinion ID: 2994298
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the prosecutors manifestly intended to refer

Text: to the defendant’s silence, or (2) the remark was of such a character that the jury would naturally and necessarily take it to be a comment on the defendant’s silence. Rodriguez v. Peters, 63 F.3d at 561 (citations omitted.) Once we determine that a violation occurred, we apply harmless error review to decide whether the remark prejudiced the defendant’s case. See id. As an initial point, the defense emphasizes the distinction between error that is harmless and error that is harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense believes Judge Manning applied a lower standard of harmless error review to the purported Fifth Amendment violation, and because she found the error to be just barely harmless, it follows that under the higher standard, the error could not be harmless. As we acknowledged in Cotnam, 88 F.3d at 498 n.11, this Court has not always clearly articulated the different analyses to be applied to prosecutorial misconduct under the Fifth Amendment compared to that applied under a general due process claim. Rodriguez v. Peters, for example, seemed to apply both the five-factor due process test to a Fifth Amendment violation, 63 F.3d at 557, as well as the two-part Fifth Amendment test. 63 F.3d at 561. Ultimately, we found no prejudice stemming from the Fifth Amendment error in Rodriguez v. Peters, 63 F.3d at 562, a holding that does not reveal whether in that case we considered the appropriate standard to be harmless or harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, since no prejudice would be harmless under either standard. Judge Manning addressed the improper prosecutorial comment claims together, see United States v. Andreas, 23 F.Supp.2d 855, 862 (N.D.