Court Opinion

ID: 9740285
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 20:31:45.203061+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:24:17.286946
License: Public Domain

On Application for Rehearing
Defendant Taylor applies for a rehearing reiterating his claim that the prosecutor, in cross-examining Taylor at trial, sought improperly to bring out that Taylor had declined to make any statement to police immediately after he was arrested. In our original opinion above we said:
"We do not perceive the prosecutor’s questions as attempts to use Taylor’s silence as evidence of his guilt. We view them rather as attempts to elicit from Taylor a prior statement inconsistent with his testimony at trial. Cf. People v Graham, 386 Mich 452, 458 (1971). The point was not belabored. There is nothing on this record to indicate—nor indeed is it claimed—that the prosecutor knew that no such statement had been made.”
Taylor, on application for rehearing, for the first time raises the contention that the prosecutor was aware that no such inconsistent statement had been given before he questioned Taylor, and we are now directed to testimony of a police officer which supports this contention.
We have again reviewed the testimony in question. We remain unconvinced that the prosecutor sought by his questions to raise Taylor’s silence in the face of his accusers as evidence against him. The prosecutor did not persist in his questions *648after Taylor denied having made an inconsistent statement, and the prosecutor did not in his arguments to the jury refer in any way to Taylor’s silence.
When it affirmatively appears that a prosecutor has consciously and deliberately sought to introduce improper and prejudicial evidence against a defendant, reversal may indeed be required. See People v Robinson, 386 Mich 551, 563 (1972). Where the record does not clearly support such a conclusion, however, but is ambiguous, as is the record here, the defendant must establish his claim by, for example, a motion for new trial supplementing and clarifying the record. Cf. People v Jelks, 33 Mich App 425, 431 (1971). This Taylor has not sought to do. Instead he asks us to conclude from some fleeting questions and responses in an otherwise manifestly fair record that the prosecutor so overstepped the bounds of his office that we should order a new trial. We are of the opinion that these passing questions and responses, which could not reasonably have affected the jury’s deliberations, do not justify a new trial.
Application for rehearing denied.