United States v. Hill

Stanley Hill appealed conviction on several charges related to the robbery of a bank. During trial, Charles Jones, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), testified as an expert. And when the prosecutor asked about Stanley's repeated invocations of God in support of his truthfulness, Jones stated, "My training has shown me, and more[ ]so my experience in all these interviews, when people start bringing faith into validating [] their statements, that they're deceptive. Those are deceptive statements." Stanley did not contemporaneously object to the admission of this evidence. Nevertheless, the Tenth Circuit concluded the court plainly erred in admitting this testimony and, in the Court's opinion, in light of the relative weakness of the government's overall case, that it affected Stanley's substantial rights. The Court concluded that this appeal was one of the exceptional cases in which it exercised its discretion to notice the plain error because failing to do so would seriously undermine the fairness, integrity, or public reputation of judicial proceedings.View "United States v. Hill" on Justia Law