United States v. Johnson, Spencer L.

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that prosecutorial misconduct during closing argument did not prejudice defendant, in part, because judge issued general instructions ordering jury “to convict based only on the evidence and reminding] the jury that the lawyers’ arguments were not evidence”
• allowing courts to “consider the jurors’ common sense in assessing the effect of a prosecutor’s statement”
• despite lack of specific curative instruction error harmless because, among other reasons, “great weight of the evidence strongly supports Johnson’s conviction”
• “[A] prosecutor may not ask jurors to find a defendant guilty as a means of promoting community values, maintaining order, or 18 discouraging future crime.”
• “In assessing claims of prosecutorial misstatements, the court is required to determine whether the disputed remarks constituted error and whether they substantially prejudiced the defendant’s trial.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).