Good law ✅— No negative treatment on recordhow we know
Decided 2004-12-20
How this case has been cited
Cited by 63 later decisions — most recently June 2025 · most notably Hobbs v. State (2011), Rose v. State (2007)
2 district · 57 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
¶2I write separately to express my disagreement with that portion of the majority’s analysis which characterizes as misconduct the State’s remarks in closing argument concerning defense expert testimony. I see a great difference between disparaging or belittling an expert as “[t]he hired gun from Hot Tub Country”1 and calling an expert “high falootin’,” which is hyperbole, but not misconduct. I also believe that the money charged by an expert is very proper impeachment material and properly referred to in argument. In this instance, the State’s reference to the fact that Clark County paid Mr. Esten’s fee is not misconduct. The prosecutor’s statement in this case is a far cry from the comment in Sipsas,2where the prosecutor’s remark was calculated to make the jurors feel cheated as taxpayers and to thereby build resentment against Sipsas, the defendant.
¶3Having said that, I believe that even without its determination of prosecutorial misconduct the majority’s conclusion that Butler is entitled to a new sentencing hearing is proper.
