Court Opinion

ID: 9493408
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:07:09.247485+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:49.362151
License: Public Domain

*832ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER,
Circuit Judge; concurring in part and dissenting in part.
Like my colleagues, I do not believe that the questions centering on Aliwoli’s race and religion deprived him, in the end, of a fair trial. The questions themselves are troublesome. Certainly, the State was entitled to explore plausible explanations for this crime other than insanity. Yet, there is nothing in the circumstances of the offense, or elsewhere in the record, that suggests Aliwoli’s race or religion actually might have played a role in his attack upon the three police officers. The closest thing to it is a statement by family members, recounted in a report of Aliwoli’s psychosocial history, that “although a Muslim, he did not seem to be excessively hostile towards whites.” R. 506. This is a slender reed, if it is any support at all, for a series of questions aimed at establishing that Ali-woli, as a Black Muslim, might have distrusted the police and viewed Caucasians as “white devils.” E.g., R. 587-88. The literature that the prosecutor also cited as a basis for these inquiries (e.g., R. 586, 712) offers no more justification. In a society that is highly conscious of racial and religious differences, it comes as no surprise that there may be tension among peoples whose skin colors and houses of worship differ; and many, if not most, races and religions can lay unhappy claim to members who promote distrust of, and even violence against, persons of other races and religions. But to ascribe to a defendant a motive to kill simply because he is a Black Muslim and because other African-Americans, or other Muslims, have expressed distrust (or worse) of different races and religions, is to engage in wholly inappropriate stereotyping. I think that the questions posed in this case may, in some instances, have come close to such stereotyping, rather than focusing on what the defendant himself believed. Nonetheless, like my colleagues, I conclude that because the witnesses uniformly rejected the notion that Aliwoli’s race or religion may have supplied him with a motive to harm the police officers, and because the State refrained from pursuing this theory in its closing arguments, Aliwoli was not deprived of his constitutional right to a fair trial.
What did deprive him of that right, in my view, was the prosecutor’s assertion, in closing argument, that the defense was attempting' to “flimflam”' the jury by asserting that Aliwoli was insane “so that he can go laughing out the door of this courtroom.” R. 587. The message that the prosecutor intended to convey is unmistakable: “Find him not guilty by reason of insanity and he will go free.” The remarks were not only improper in the sense that they invited the jury to consider the sentencing consequences of its verdict, see Shannon v. United States, 512 U.S. 573, 579, 114 S.Ct. 2419, 2424, 129 L.Ed.2d 459 (1994), but also in the sense that they suggested, inaccurately, that an insanity finding would necessarily set Aliwoli free, see Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 38 ¶ 1005-2-4 (1987), now codified at 730 ILCS 5/5-2-4. Only the trial judge could have corrected the misimpression that the prosecutor planted in the jurors’ minds, but he declined to give a proffered instruction that would have explained to the jury the true consequences of a not guilty by reason of insanity verdict. See Shannon, 512 U.S. at 587-88, 114 S.Ct. at 2428 (noting that such an appropriate corrective instruction may be required when the prosecution suggests that the defendant will “go free”). True, the defense had the opportunity to argue in its own closing that an insanity verdict would not set Aliwoli free, but why would the jury have believed his attorney? The fact that the trial judge overruled the objection to the prosecutor’s remarks, and allowed the State to sound the same refrain in rebuttal, see R. 890, 892,1 if any*833thing imbued this line of argument with credibility. The assertions that the defense was engaged in trickery and deceit, e.g., R. 857, 888 — again, objected to but nonetheless allowed — would only have reinforced the notion that the defense would achieve total victory (i.e. freedom for Ali-woli) in an insanity finding, although I agree with my colleagues that the asser: tions of trickery do not support relief in and of themselves. The standard instructions indicating that it was the judge’s responsibility to deal with the question of punishment, and that the attorneys’ arguments were not evidence, did absolutely nothing to clear up the problem. As my colleagues point out, there was indeed evidence that Aliwoli acted in an apparently sane manner (ante at 880). Yet, there was also considerable evidence that he was mentally disturbed, and the jury’s determination that he was mentally ill confirms the weight of that evidence. Given that the prosecutor’s misleading arguments as to the consequence of an insanity verdict were never corrected, and that the jury opted for a middle-ground finding that he was guilty but mentally ill, I cannot say with any confidence that the error in this case was harmless. In that respect, then, I respectfully dissent.

. I recognize that Aliwoli has procedurally defaulted any claim based on the remarks *833made in rebuttal, see Aliwoli v. Gilmore, 127 F.3d 632, 634 (7th Cir.1997), but these remarks nonetheless bear on the prejudicial impact of the remarks made in the prosecution's initial closing argument.