United States v. Jay Kerr

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that improper vouching occurred when the prosecutor introduced his own opinion about credibility through comments including “I think he [the witness] was candid. I think he was honest.”
• holding that an instruction that the jurors “are the sole judges of the credibility of the witnesses” was insufficient only because the prosecutor created a “crisis situation” by “portraying the government as the guarantor of the testimony’s truthfulness”
• stating that tangential evidence is not material because it is insufficient to cast doubt on the ultimate result reached
• observing that “[t]o determine whether the prosecutor’s misconduct affected UNITED STATES v. BOULWARE 19413 the jury’s verdict, we look first to the substance of a curative instruction.”
• reversing on ground of prosecutorial misconduct where “the testimony of the four ‘vouched’ witnesses was crucial to the government’s case and the prosecutor’s argument” and “[o]nly indirect evidence connected [the defendant] to the [crime]”
• holding improper vouching is subject to harmless error analysis

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).