Court Opinion

ID: 9652527
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 17:25:26.708608+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:04:25.987135
License: Public Domain

MACK, Associate Judge, Retired,
dissenting:
On this record, the government’s evidence, taken alone, establishes one of the strongest circumstantial settings for a reasonable claim of self-defense that an accused could hope to establish — a wife and her mother fending off injury from the hands of a husband, crazed by alcohol and PCP, and destructively swinging a steel pole as a bat. The self-defense claim was interposed by appellant from the time of her arrest and renewed at trial. The government’s evidence at trial by no means conclusively established “beyond a reasonable doubt” that appellant, in using a steak knife to stab her husband, was not acting in self-defense.1 See Bynum v. United States, 133 U.S.App.D.C. 4, 408 F.2d 1207 (1968), cert. denied, 394 U.S. 935, 89 S.Ct. 1211, 22 L.Ed.2d 466 (1969). Moreover, appellant testified unequivocally that she stabbed her husband out of fear that she was in imminent danger of bodily harm. That the jury reached the verdict it did, therefore, in itself speaks to the question of whether the jury was substantially swayed by cumulative prosecutorial misconduct, see (Philip) Dyson v. United States, 418 A.2d 127, 132 (D.C.1980), or whether such conduct so clearly prejudiced substantial rights as to jeopardize the fairness and integrity of trial. Watts v. United States, 362 A.2d 706, 709 (D.C.1976) (en banc).
I agree with the pronouncement of the majority that the issue before us is not one of sympathy. That is precisely why I find the repeated emotional appeals at trial by the prosecutor to the jury to constitute prejudicial error. In my opinion the parading of the decedent’s blood-stained shirt before the jury,2 where there was no issue whatever as to the cause of death, constitutes grounds for reversal. Cf. Hawthorne v. United States, 476 A.2d 164, 170-72 & n. 13 (D.C.1984). The error is compounded by the conduct of the prosecutor in showing photographs of the decedent taken before and after death, where there *82was no question of identity, and the improper argument that the decedent would not see his children and that the children would grow up without him.3 The issue is not whether this latter argument was truthful, as the majority suggests, but whether the argument, based upon truths having no probative value, was purely an emotional appeal to the passion, prejudices, and sympathy of the jury — which it indis-putedly was. See id. at 171-72.
Just as egregious is the prosecutor’s explicit and implied misstatement of the law and the facts. He defined manslaughter— at least four different times — as being a “criminal mistake,” thus seriously misrepresenting the seriousness of the crime and therefore the incidents that would follow from a conviction. Moreover, he improperly argued non-evidence, created through an “impeachment by omission” technique, without seeking the permission of the trial court. See Hill v. United States, 404 A.2d 525, 531 (D.C.1979), cert. denied, 444 U.S. 1085, 100 S.Ct. 1042, 62 L.Ed.2d 770 (1980). Thus using appellant’s statement given to the police during a three hour early-morning interrogation following the crime, the prosecutor argued that appellant’s failure to mention her fear at the time of the crime was inconsistent with her testimony at trial that she was afraid, and he referred to her repeatedly as “the woman who was not afraid.” The basic unfairness of using this technique is not so much that permission was not obtained (the majority points out the substantive nature of the pretrial statement) but that there simply is no inconsistency which could be used for impeachment or evidentiary purposes. At the time of the pretrial statement, appellant, who had no prior criminal experience, who was recovering from surgery, and who had been battered just prior to interrogation, was asked only to recount what had happened in her own words. Unlike the appellant in Hill, supra, she did not omit any important facts as to the circumstances of the crime. She was not asked about “fear”; neither would it have been “natural” for her to have characterized her own emotional response to the violence at this time, see Hill, supra, 404 A.2d at 531 (citing 3A J. Wigmore, Evidence § 1402 (Chadbourne Rev. 1970)). In point of fact, it would not have been “natural” for the police to have asked such a question in view of the circumstances of the crime.4
Since all of the evidence supports the fact that a reasonable person, whether afraid or not, would believe she was in imminent danger of bodily harm, I conclude that the overreaching of the prosecutor, in invoking the sympathy of the jury and in misrepresenting the law and the facts, has jeopardized the fairness and integrity of the trial. See Watts, supra. I respectfully dissent.5

. The contested evidence as to whether the pole was raised or lowered at the precise time of the stabbing, even if viewed in the light most favorable to the government, is hardly convincing to negate self-defense under the circumstances.

. Appellant states that the prosecutor removed the shirt from the plastic bag and waved it before the jury. The transcript reflects only this:
Dr. Kim came in and told you a downward thrust. You saw the jacket. You got a chance to take a look at it. Let’s make it very clear, ladies and gentlemen. This shirt was described as a black and white shirt. You see that it is brown and black. That’s blood. You will see it if you take it out of the bag, if you care to.
And you remember when I showed it to the witnesses it had been ripped and torn. Medics came and you can understand in trying to revive him that this is not the way it was when Charlie Dixon got stabbed.
And you can correspond that with the jacket you were shown where the rip is. Isn’t that amazing? One little rip and within 10 minutes all of Charlie Dixon’s blood has run out on the floor and he's dead. For what? For a coffee table, two holes in a wall, and three swings.

. The prosecutor said:
We are here because Charlie Dixon is dead. Charlie Dixon, the man on PCP, the man who was swinging the pipe, the man who is in this jealous rage. But he lived. He had breath. He fathered a son. He will not get to see the son or the daughter across the room from you. They will grow up without Charlie.

. A more basic reason for questioning the prosecutor’s use of the impeachment technique to create evidence of lack of fear is that fear is not an element of self-defense. It was only necessary that appellant, under the circumstances as they appeared to her at the time of the incident, actually believed that she was in imminent danger of bodily harm (or to justify deadly force, that she was in imminent danger of death or serious bodily harm), and that she had reasonable grounds for this belief. See Criminal Jury Instructions for the District of Columbia, Nos. 5.13 & 5.14 (3d ed. 1978); United States v. Peterson, 157 U.S.App.D.C. 219, 226-27, 483 F.2d 1222, 1229-30, cert. denied, 414 U.S. 1007, 94 S.Ct. 367, 38 L.Ed.2d 244 (1973).

. It is not at all relevant that the prosecutor was acting in the “heat of battle" or that the trial court thought his performance "professional." Indeed one might draw an inference that a sympathetic trial judge stood somewhat in awe of the ability of the prosecutor to prevail in this case. Significantly, in addition to what the majority has recited in note 1, the Court also observed:
It’s of no solace to Ms. Dixon [whom the trial court would have found not guilty] ... *83[b]ut I can say that, as far as I’m concerned, I think the government did an unusually difficult job with an unusually difficult set of circumstances.