Court Opinion

ID: 9752759
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 18:33:22.802024+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:27:21.880890
License: Public Domain

McDERMOTT, Justice,
concurring and dissenting.
I join the majority’s affirmance of the conviction, however, I must dissent from the overreaction of the majority to the prosecution’s biblical reference. The standard in evaluating whether a prosecutor crossed the line in his closing argument is whether his comments would have “the effect of arousing the jury’s emotion to such a degree that it becomes impossible for the jury to impose sentence based on consideration of the relevant evidence according to the standards of the statute.” Commonwealth v. Travaglia, 502 Pa. 474, 502, 467 A.2d 288, 302 (1983). In this case the isolated comment of the prosecutor was the last sentence in a brief closing. This was not emotional oratory calling for divinely motivated retribution; rather it was a reference to one of the texts from which our social system has evolved. The majority opinion is an unmerited censure of citizens called to such vast responsibility. To believe them swayed from their solemn, sworn duty by a single reference to a *588legal irrelevance is a presciosity that undermines the very essence of trial by jury.