Court Opinion

ID: 9472292
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 03:55:32.235148+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:42:50.953658
License: Public Domain

ELY, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the result reached in Judge Nelson’s carefully written Opinion. At the same time, however, I disassociate myself from some of the majority’s comments in respect to the conduct of the appellee’s attorney. At one point, the majority characterizes some of the attorney’s comments as “offending,” and at another point, the majority writes “We have no trouble concluding that Lauchengco’s remarks were improper.” Since I have more than even slight “trouble” in so concluding, I cannot conscientiously endorse or approve the quoted sentence.
The appellee alleged, in effect, that she had been swindled by the appellants, designated collectively by the majority as “Smith Barney.” Smith Barney is a large, nationally respected investment firm, and the jury determined, as alleged, that two individual agents of the firm had betrayed the trust that the appellee, an unsophisticated lady, had reposed in Smith Barney. Comments made by attorneys in opening statements are, of course, not evidence, and no citation is required for the elementary proposition that attorneys are allowed wide latitude in their closing arguments to juries. This being true, it seems to me that when one has been so victimized and mistreated, as was the appellee in the present case, the wrongdoer deserves to be condemned by the victim’s attorney in the harshest terms. That is why I cannot in good conscience agree that the remarks of the appellee’s attorney were legally “offending” or that I have “no trouble” in “concluding” that the “remarks were improper.”