Prosecutorial misconduct; People v. Unger; People v. Bahoda; Credibility; People v. Wolfe; Errors that could have been cured by a jury instruction; People v. Stanaway; Ineffective assistance of counsel; People v. Lockett; Failure to raise a futile objection; People v. Ericksen; Matters of trial strategy; People v. Reed; Other acts evidence; MRE 404(b)(1); People v. Sabin; People v. Denson; People v. VanderVliet; MRE 403; People v. Sharpe; Harmless error; People v. Hawthorne; People v. Burns; Sentencing; Principle of individualized sentencing; People v. Pennington

The court concluded that the prosecutor did not commit misconduct by arguing about details witness-S explicitly or implicitly admitted, and that even if there had been misconduct, defendant failed to show prejudice. Further, his trial counsel’s failure to object did not impact the trial. The court also rejected defendant’s challenge to the admission of other acts evidence, and found no merit to his claim that the trial court sentenced him on the basis of his decision not to plead guilty and to go to trial. Thus, it affirmed his armed robbery conviction and sentence, as a third-offense habitual offender, to 16 to 70 years. The “case arose from an alleged scheme by defendant and his mother to lure the victim to the mother’s home and rob him.” S, defendant’s bunkmate in jail, testified about details of defendant’s crime that he allegedly learned from their conversations and disclosed to police. “These details included that defendant told him that his mother set up the victim for the robbery, that defendant told him that the amount he stole was $300, and that defendant believed he would not be caught because he was not found with a gun or the correct amount of money.” The court noted that S’s “testimony was inconsistent, and at times confusing.” While he denied remembering making the statements, “he acknowledged that he knew these details because of statements from his conversations with defendant.” Whether S was truthful was for the jury to determine. The court added that, even if there was prosecutorial misconduct, S’s “testimony was a relatively small part of a much broader argument utilizing physical evidence presented at trial. To the extent that the prosecutor relied on facts not in evidence, this argument would only be of minimal impact because, as [S] repeatedly insisted, defendant only made these statements to [S] in the context of a generalized discussion of their cases.” Thus, as far as the jurors were concerned, they were only hearing the details of the charges against defendant as he perceived them. Further, the jury was instructed that the prosecutor’s arguments were not “evidence and that the jury should only decide the facts of the case on the basis of witness testimony and other evidence presented. Any minimal prejudice” a defendant sustains due to a “prosecutor’s argument is generally cured by the trial court’s appropriate instruction.”