Zurinaga

In his closing argument to the jury, the prosecutor in this case equated the terrible events of 9/11 to appellants’ home invasion robbery of nine college students in their residence hall. He then displayed a chart listing the flight numbers and airliners downed on that day as well as the numbers of passengers and crew who died. He discussed the. victims’ telephone calls .to “loved ones.” He argued it was his duty to “transport” the jurors to the crime scene so- that they could feel the “terror” the victims experienced.

“Like the Hydra slain by Hercules, prosecutorial misconduct has many heads.” (United States v. Williams (1992) 504 U.S. 36, 60 [ 118 L.Ed.2d 352 , 112 S.Ct. 1735 ] (dis. opn. of Stevens, J.).) Regrettably, Hercules .was far more successful than have been the federal and state courts in controlling it. In 1935 Justice Sutherland iterated his oft-quoted admonition: “The [prosecuting attorney] is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case,…