Court Opinion

ID: 9692828
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 16:07:35.39123+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:19:37.165382
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Joslin,
with whom
Mr. Justice Kelleher
joins, dissenting. In this case comments by the prosecutor in his opening statement and summation, together with an unresponsive answer by a prosecution witness during rebuttal, revealed to the jury that the defendant and a *25companion were seated in an automobile parked in the rear of a business establishment on a summer Saturday afternoon, that they were “drinking something out of a bottle * * similar to something you would get in a drugstore,” and that defendant was “groggy.”
Although the absence of a complete transcript makes it impossible for us to consider those bits of information in context — a requisite under State v. Bowden, 113 R. I. 649, 654, 324 A.2d 631, 635 (1974), whenever a defendant contends that an improper comment has deprived him of a fair and impartial trial — I am willing to concede that those comments may have been extraneous to the ultimate issue of whether defendant assaulted a police officer with a dangerous weapon. But it is quite another thing to say that those revelations, even if extraneous, were so flagrantly improper that they inflamed and aroused the passions of the jurors and became so indelibly etched on their minds that prompt and appropriate cautionary instructions by the trial justice could not disabuse the jurors of their potentially prejudicial effect. And only if that were so could we properly conclude that it was not reasonably possible for the jurors to appraise the evidence objectively and dispassionately and that a mistrial should have been granted. See State v. Costa, 111 R. I. 602, 609-10, 306 A.2d 36, 40 (1973); State v. Mancini, 108 R. I. 261, 273-74, 274 A.2d 742, 748 (1971); State v. Kozukonis, 100 R. I. 298, 303, 214 A.2d 893, 897 (1965); State v. Werner, 87 R. I. 314, 318-19, 140 A.2d 502, 504 (1958); State v. Lacy, 87 R. I. 134, 139-40, 138 A.2d 827, 829-30 (1958); State v. Peters, 82 R. I. 292, 297-300, 107 A.2d 428, 430-32 (1954); Lavigne v. Ballantyne, 66 R. I. 123, 126, 17 A.2d 845, 846 (1941).
In my view the extraneous information, rather than being likely to incite the prejudices of the jurors, was completely innocuous and could not reasonably be thought *26to have had any effect on their determination of the de-i fendant’s guilt or innocence. But even if I am too tolerant' in that judgment, it is inconceivable to me that the jurors' were incapable of heeding the trial justice’s instruction to ignore that information. To hold in these circumstances,as do the majority, that the jurors were incapable of compliance is, in my opinion, to cast doubt on the ability of' juries generally to disregard any irrelevant evidence or improper prosecutorial comments. That conclusion assumes so little confidence in the intelligence and fairness of jurors as to suggest that an errorless jury trial is virtually impossible to obtain and, at least implicitly, that the jury system ought to be abandoned. Because I find those premises and conclusions untenable, I respectfully dissent.1
Julius C. Michaelson, Attorney General, William O. Brody, Special Asst. Attorney General, for plaintiff.
Bevilacqua & Cicilline, for defendant.

The only testimony contained in the partial transcript certified to us in this case is that of the defendant, and limited excerpts from the direct examination and the rebuttal of the complaining -witness. I therefore-find it impossible to pass on the state’s contention that the claimed error, if any, was harmless. The majority apparently do not encounter the same difficulty, for they are willing to say:
“The state’s case depended mainly upon the testimony of the police witnesses just as the defense depended upon the testimony of defendant. We cannot say, on this record, that the bulk of the evidence was against defendant or that the evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of the state. Compare State v. Thornley, 113 R. I. 189, 196, 319 A.2d 94, 98 (1974) with State v. Camerlin, 108 R. I. 524, 277 A.2d 291 (1971).”