A Mobile-based federal prosecutor could face discipline after an appellate court sharply criticized her conduct during a criminal trial, prompting the reversal of a conviction and the vacating of a 10-year prison sentence.
U.S. Attorney Kenyen Brown said that any case in which a court finds prosecutorial misconduct is automatically referred to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility for further review. Brown’s office said it plans to retry the underlying case, though no new trial date had been set at the time of the ruling.
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the sentence and reversed the conviction of a Mobile man who had been found guilty on a federal gun charge earlier in the year. The man, a felon previously convicted of drug crimes and receiving stolen property, was prohibited from legally possessing firearms. He had been charged after a March 2013 search of his bedroom turned up a shotgun, a rifle, and evidence connected to methamphetamine production.
According to the appellate ruling, the prosecutor made an improper and false claim during closing arguments, conflating separate pieces of testimony to assert that the defendant had traded methamphetamine for sex with a specific individual, an assertion the record did not support. The court also found that the prosecutor improperly suggested the defendant’s guilt based on his invocation of his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent during testimony, at one point appearing to tell jurors that invoking the right implied the witness was hiding something.
In his written opinion, the 11th Circuit’s chief judge did not mince words, writing that the trial errors “were as plain as could be.” The court noted that the prosecutor had been asked to appear at a hearing to explain her conduct, and that her explanation was “unconvincing.”
The case has drawn attention within Mobile’s legal community as a rare instance of an appellate court publicly rebuking a sitting federal prosecutor’s trial conduct and ordering a case restarted as a result. The defendant’s public defender did not immediately comment on the ruling.
With the conviction reversed, prosecutors in the Mobile federal court will now have to build their case again from the retrial stage, while the Justice Department’s internal review process determines what, if any, professional consequences the prosecutor may face for her handling of the original trial.