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Hawaii Supreme Court· 6/29/2018

State v. Austin

Citations

  • 143 Haw. 18
  • 422 P.3d 18

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

  • explaining that “the prosecutor’s statement that [defendant] ‘lied to you’ was functionally equivalent to ‘I think [defendant] lied to you’”
  • holding that the prosecutor's rebuttal was not 5 NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN WEST'S HAWAI#I REPORTS AND PACIFIC REPORTER misconduct because the rebuttal was in response to the defendant's closing arguments and within the wide latitude that prosecutors have in their rebuttal to closing arguments
  • barring the use of “lie” to describe a witness’s testimony to “allay[] the uncertainty of counsel and trial courts otherwise tasked with determining when the use of the term crosses the line . . . into actual impropriety” (cleaned up)
  • \it is not improper for prosecutors to assert that a defendant's testimony is not credible in a variety of ways so long as such an inference is reasonably supported by the evidence\
  • “[t]he word’s strongly pejorative tone conveys the speaker’s subjective disapproval that the witness would taint the judicial process with dishonesty, effectively coupling an assertion of the speaker’s opinion with the factual contentions that are innate in the word ‘lie’”
  • “[T]he prosecutor’s remark regarding whether [the defendant’s] testimony was corroborated by other evidence may also have qualified as misconduct to the extent that it might infer that [the defendant] had a burden to produce evidence tending to corroborate his testimony.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).

Judges: Recktenwald

Read full opinion on CourtListener

Cited by

27 cases in this archive cite this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

Cites

81 cases in this archive are cited by this case; the 20 most cited are listed.

Other cases with this name

Sourced from CourtListener / Free Law Project (CC0).

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