Court Opinion

ID: 9466328
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 01:12:23.800955+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:39:40.328638
License: Public Domain

KEARSE, Circuit Judge
(concurring):
I concur in the result and in most of Judge Newman’s opinion but would add the following observations.
The prosecutor urged the jury to believe the testimony of Officer Dorman because she was Black, the defendant was Black, and Dorman’s testimony was accusatory. The immediate implication of the prosecutor’s statement was twofold. First, it suggested that an accusation by a Black witness is more likely to be truthful if made against a Black defendant than if made against a White defendant. Second, it suggested that testimony of a Black witness with respect to a Black defendant is more likely to be truthful if it accuses him than if it supports him.
In my view, therefore, the prosecutor’s appeal not only may have led the jury to credit unduly Officer Dorman’s testimony, but also may have led the jury to believe that Singletary, the sole witness in support of the defendant, was more likely to be lying — not because he and the defendant were friends but because he and the defendant were Black. Accordingly, I find authorities such as Allison v. State, 157 Tex.Cr. 200, 248 S.W.2d 147 (1952), not irrelevant to the case at hand.
The overall effect of the prosecutor’s remarks was to imply that Black persons, as contrasted with White persons (the district attorney’s office admits it is inconceivable that a prosecutor would make a statement of this kind about a White witness and a White defendant), can be expected to allow racial considerations to affect their testimony. I suspect that this invidious premise, rather than the level of incidence of intragroup accusation, is what was in the prosecutor’s mind when he said, “If she’s lying she’s lying against a member, a person that [sic] is black,” and what he conveyed to the jury when he urged, “You use your common sense to think about” whether “she’s lying against another black person.”