Opinion ID: 1561252
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Patriotism gone awry.

Text: My colleagues fault the prosecutor for urging the jury to tell [5] Coreas that in this country the jury decides guilt or innocence, and that here, a victim or relative of a victim may not take the law into his own hands and seek retribution. They say that this comment was clearly calculated to arouse the national bias and sympathy of the jury and was improper. Both Coreas and the decedent, Perez, came to this country from El Salvador. If, contrary to Donnelly v. DeChristoforo, supra , the prosecutor's comment was to be construed as implicitly chauvinistic and prejudiced against foreigners or persons of Hispanic origin, any belittling of the defendant in this manner would apply equally to the decedent. I think it most unlikely that the prosecutor intended by her remarks to convey disrespect towards people from El Salvador. In a homicide case, it would surely be self-defeating to suggest to the jury that the victim was a person of little worth. I think the prosecutor's remark about this country is more readily explained, as are many things, by the context in which it was made. Counsel for Coreas described his client as a husband and a father and a carpenter who came to the United States because of the freedoms that we have in the United States, because of the United States Constitution which guarantees these freedoms. She also depicted him as a law-abiding man who went to the police when his brother was killed. I do not suggest that what the defense attorney said was improper. I agree with the government, however, that the challenged part of the prosecutor's rebuttal was a fair response to defense counsel's emotional appeal to the jury to find that appellant was merely a law-abiding lover of freedom, who now found himself defending against an unjust charge that he had murdered Apoliano Perez.