Court Opinion

ID: 9581014
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 22:11:00.671969+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:36:39.312448
License: Public Domain

LEVINE, Justice
(specially concurring).
I write specially to note my departure from that part of the majority opinion that holds that defendant’s failure to request a curative instruction waived any argument of prejudice. I do not agree that defendant *307was obliged to request a curative instruction in light of the court’s overruling defendant’s objection to the prosecutor's statement.
State v. Welch, 426 N.W.2d 550 (N.D.1988), is inapposite. In Welch, the trial court sustained Welch’s objection to the improper statement. Although Welch moved for a mistrial, he did not request a cautionary instruction. We concluded that the failure to request the curative instruction, under the circumstances, waived the argument of prejudice and the failure to give a curative instruction was not obvious error under the circumstances of the case. Underlying our analysis in Welch, as in all eases where a curative instruction is deemed necessary, are the unarticulated premises that if a statement is objected to and the objection is sustained by the trial court, then, because juries are deemed to follow the instructions given by the court, and because many errors are curable by cautionary instructions, and because trial courts are deemed willing to caution juries not to pay attention to improper statements, a curative instruction must be requested to preserve the issue of prejudice. In other words, when an objection to an improper statement is sustained, a request for a cautionary instruction is ordinarily a condition precedent for raising the issue of prejudice on appeal. However, it is sheer folly to expect that a trial judge, who has ruled that a remark is not improper and who has therefore overruled an objection to that remark, will nonetheless give a curative instruction that the jury is to disregard that remark. See, e.g., Ralston v. State, 555 So.2d 443 (Fla.Ct.App.1990). The law does not demand futile acts and neither should we. In my view, defendant did not waive any claim of prejudice by failing to ask for a curative instruction. The defendant’s objection to the argument, overruled by the trial court, was sufficient to preserve the questions of both the propriety of the remark and its prejudicial impact. Accord Hairston v. State, 68 Md.App. 230, 511 A.2d 73 (1986).
I agree, however, that the trial court’s error, if any, in overruling the objection was harmless under Rule 52(a), NDRCrimP. The instructions given by the trial court oh the State’s burden of proof arid the abundant evidence in support of the verdict assure that the verdict would have been the same without the prosecutor’s remark.
I, therefore, concur in the result as well as in the rationale for the holding that the trial court did not err in refusing defendant’s offer of unwritten instructions.