Court Opinion

ID: 9696771
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 18:57:57.398106+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:26.729543
License: Public Domain

*160Dissenting Opinion by
Mr. Justice Pomeroy:
I agree with the Court that the remark of the District Attorney was improper, and I do not condone it. My review of the record, however, satisfies me that the Court greatly exaggerates the incident, and that it could not have had the destructive effect on the defendant’s case that the Court attributes to it. The District Attorney’s remark was, in my view, “harmless beyond a reasonable doubt,” Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24, 17 L. Ed. 2d 705, 711 (1967), and the motion for a mistrial was properly overruled.
To place the matter in perspective, defense witness McDonald had been testifying for some time to conversations which he had had with Commonwealth witnesses Taggart and Barlow (all three being then in jail) as to their desire to frame the defendant with conviction of some burglaries. McDonald was then asked whether Taggart said anything about bail, and answered that “Taggart told me he had $80,000 bail. . . .” The District Attorney then said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that figure.” The witness then responded: “He [Taggart] told me that he had $80,000 bail, that he signed statements [for the prosecution, presumably] and his bail went down to $8,000, and he would sign any statement. Then later on, in another county, he had $30,000 bail, and he told me that he signed statements there and got $3,000 there, so he had a total of $11,000 left.” Thereupon the following occurred :
“Mr. Snyder .[the District Attorney] : Your Hon- or, I would like to ask that this answer be stricken . . . as being purely hearsay.
“Mr. Potter [defense counsel]: It’s not offered for the truth of it, Your Honor; it’s offered for what Taggert said.
*161“The Court: I’ll overrule the objection. I agree that this doesn’t prove the truth of the alleged statements.
“The Witness [continuing] : So he had it down to $11,000. And he said that after this he wouldn’t make any more statements unless people would give nominal bail for making statements. . . .” (N.T. 130, 131)
When later the District Attorney, in his summation, made the improper remark, quoted in the majority opinion (particularly the last sentence, that he had “no idea why it [the McDonald answer] was put in, but apparently Mr. Potter didn’t believe it”) and the objection to it was made, the court observed, “Well, it came up on a technical point.” Defense counsel, Mr. Potter, agreed, and then said, “For him to say tha,t I’m calling my witness a liar, I object and ask for a mistrial.”
“The Court: Never mind. Make no more speeches, gentlemen.
[Defense counsel] : I’m not on trial here.
The Court: It came up on a technical point, and I think you can drop it now.”
The mistrial motion was then overruled.
Viewed in this context, I think the court below was correct when, in its opinion, it stated that the District Attorney’s comment “carried no particular weight” with the jury. His sense of the importance (or lack of it) of an improper comment such as the one here involved, derived as it is from the total trial setting and atmosphere, is normally to be preferred to the impression an appellate court can have from reading a record. As we recently observed in Commonwealth v. Silvis, 445 Pa. 235, 237, 284 A. 2d 740, 741 (1971) : “control of the prosecution’s comments is largely delegated to the discretion of the trial judge.”
For these reasons, I respectfully dissent.
Mr. Chief Justice Jones joins in this dissenting opinion.