Opinion ID: 2155795
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The prosecutor's other appeals to the passions of the jury, assaults on opposing counsel, and inflammatory rhetoric.

Text: The prosecutor's repeated insistence that Mrs. J. was going blind was an obvious plea to the emotions of the jury, but it was by no means the only such appeal. It is no exaggeration to state that the central theme of government counsel's entire closing argument, and especially of her rebuttal, was a not very subtle attempt to gain the jurors' sympathy for Mrs. J. (whom the prosecutor depicted as a poor and oppressed underdog) and to generate resentment against the defendants (whom she cast as rich, powerful and arrogant physicians who had no respect for the law and who felt nothing but contempt for their unfortunate victim). This theme reached its zenith at the conclusion of the rebuttal argument: Ladies and gentlemen, when all is said and done, you have Ronald Anderson and William Brown, and they have every advantage. They're physicians. They have education. They have fraternity. They have affiliations. They have wealth. They have everything anyone could want. Mrs. [J.], she's poor. She's vulnerable. She has emotional baggage. She's wacky. She's a character. She has lots and lots of physical problems. But there is one thing, ladies and gentlemen, that Mrs. [J.] has that they don't. One. You know what that is? That's faith. She has faith in this, in him, in this system, in cross-examination, in court, in rules of law. She has faith that you will do your duty[,] and now I am asking you to do your duty and find the defendants guilty as charged. Whatever counsel's subjective motivation may have been, the foregoing passage comes across as an undisguised appeal to class prejudice against the powerful and privileged defendants. [21] The prosecutor also communicated to the jurors her not very complimentary personal opinion of the defendants, and in doing so, she sometimes tended to eschew nouns and verbs for adjectives and adverbs. She stated, for example, that it was Dr. Brown who did Dr. Anderson's dirty work, while Anderson stay[ed] smugly, quietly, invincibly, arrogantly in the background. [22] She attributed to Dr. Anderson a sense of [i]nvincibility, the feeling that one is invincible, cannot be touched. Arrogance and control. Much of the argument was cast in a hostile and derisive tone which was directed not only against the defendants, but against Dr. Anderson's attorney as well. [23] The trial judge was apparently troubled by the emotional character of the prosecutor's argument, but he felt constrained to countenance it as permissible, or even inevitable, under the adversarial system: [S]omeone landing on Mars listening to these  or some intelligent person from somewhere else listening to the argument might well have said what are these trials about with all [these] theatrics, because it was, I agree with you, a very impassioned closing. And if I were designing a system, I certainly would not have arguments like that, but that's our adversary system and it encourages that sort of advocacy. I didn't, as I've said, other than a couple of points you mentioned, I didn't think it crossed the line and I didn't think the total effect was improper under our present system. We appreciate the trial judge's commendable restraint and his unwillingness to convert his own personal notions of what closing arguments ideally ought to be permissible into rules of law. Nevertheless, we are unable to agree with the judge that the adversarial system, properly constrained, encourages the kind of advocacy revealed by this record. It is true that a criminal trial is not a minuet. Taylor v. United States, 134 U.S.App. D.C. 188, 189, 413 F.2d 1095, 1096 (1969). The prosecutor may make a vigorous and forceful presentation of the government's case, and broad bounds of rhetorical comment [are] permissible in closing argument. Dixon, supra, 565 A.2d at 77 (citations and internal quotation marks omitted). In our view, however, the prosecutor's rebuttal argument in this case went beyond rhetoric of the kind countenanced in our cases. Moreover, its prejudicial effect was compounded by the reality that most of the improprieties  the misstatement of the law of obstruction of justice, the reference to Mrs. J.'s impending blindness, the harsh attack on Dr. Anderson's attorney, the contrasting of poor Mrs. J. with the wealthy and powerful defendants, and the unleashing of uncomplimentary adjectives  occurred in rebuttal, when defense counsel no longer had the opportunity to respond. Cf. Coreas, supra, 565 A.2d at 600-04 & n. 8. [24] In our view, this is a case in which government counsel's argument compromised the fundamental fairness of the trial. [25]