Court Opinion

ID: 9453784
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:23:56.454703+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:48.198787
License: Public Domain

GODBOLD, Circuit Judge
(specially concurring):
The prosecution’s effort to try the appellant as an adulterer was not confined to the testimony quoted in the majority opinion. There were repeated questions, many of them improper, going to extreme lengths, implying another illicit relationship between the appellant and a female co-defendant (not the woman referred to in the quoted testimony). The prosecution tactic was unjustified and indefensible. Nor do I have much faith in the instruction to the jury to disregard, as a ground for affirmance. For the appellate court to thus insulate the prosecutor from the effect of offers of patently illegal evidence is but an invitation to him to repeat the process in the next case.
In this case the prosecution is not saved by any curative instruction from the trial court but by the character of evidence against the appellant on the matters for which he was charged. The evidence of guilt was overwhelming, in fact many of the charges were substantially admitted by appellant in his own testimony. Thus I concur in the result on the sole ground that evidence of guilt was so great that the prosecutor’s attack on the appellant’s moral character, though not curable by instructions, could have had but slight effect on the jury’s verdict. Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 764, 66 S.Ct. 1239, 90 L.Ed. 1557, 1566 (1964).