Court Opinion

ID: 9843291
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:32:28.697413+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:16:37.445575
License: Public Domain

MORRIS SHEPPARD ARNOLD, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
I would not reverse this conviction based on the remarks that the government’s counsel made during closing arguments. The court indulges every presumption against a benign construction of those remarks and its characterization of their purport is harsh. In my judgment, the statements objected to did not directly implicate defense counsel’s honesty.
I see no reason, moreover, to believe that the statements had a substantially injurious effect on the outcome of the case. Juries know that argument is not evidence; it is just talk. For all that we can know, the argument may well have gotten the jury’s back up and prejudiced the government rather than the defendant. The court presumes that juries are a lot more impressionable than experience will allow for, and gives them too little credit for a common sense ability to discount vituperation and hyperbole and to restrict themselves to a consideration of the evidence adduced at trial.
There is nothing in this case to differentiate it from the scores, perhaps hundreds of cases that have routinely come before us in the last thirty or forty years in which an identical argument has been rejected out of hand. This counsels more caution than the court employs in the present circumstances.
I would uphold this judgment and therefore respectfully dissent.