Court Opinion

ID: 9593392
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 00:22:12.64818+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:00:42.112905
License: Public Domain

Lionel K. Legge, Acting Justice
(dissenting) :
I find myself unable to agree that the portion of the solicitor’s argument quoted in the majority opinion affords a sound basis for reversal.
Where a crime has been committed and the evidence points to the defendant’s guilt, it seems to me that the prosecuting attorney may without impropriety in his argument refer to the defendant as guilty of that crime. If the crime charged be embezzlement, must the solicitor refrain from arguing to the jury, on the evidence, that the defendant is an embezzler? If, *508in a case of aggravated assault and battery, the evidence points to the defendant’s guilt of a brutal attack upon a defenseless woman, should the solicitor be forbidden in his argument, having support in the evidence, as it had in this case, to characterize it as brutal, and the defendant as a brute? I do not think so.
Nor do I think that a solicitor would be guilty of impropriety if he were to suggest to the jury, in his argument, that they consider the crime disclosed by the evidence in relation to the members of their families. For society is in reality the prosecutor; and the impact of any crime upon society in general, or upon any segment of society, whether it be pedestrians or bank depositors or children or members of the jurors’ families or the jurors themselves, is in my opinion a fair subject for argument on the part of the State.
The majority opinion suggests no disagreement with the views above expressed, except in a capital case, and then only in connection with the jury’s power to recommend mercy. If it be true, as I interpret that opinion to imply, that where the death penalty has been imposed our rule in favorem requires or justifies subjecting the propriety of argument for the State to a test more rigid than would be applied in the case of a lesser crime, or of a capital one in which the verdict contains a recommendation to mercy, I am nevertheless convinced that to forbid argument such as is here condemned would unduly restrict the solicitor’s function as the representative of society in capital cases.