UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. MICHAEL T. RAND
US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, Gregory, August 26, 2016,
Closing Argument – Prosecutor commentary on defendant’s wealth (“You just heard a story alright. It took a lot of gold. A lot of gold. The defendant’s lawyers, all of them, his experts, a lot of gold.”) was improper, but given the weight of the evidence against the defendant the error was harmless.

The interesting part of this claim deals with a defense expert destroying a state expert.
“Rand’s expert examined the data on the backup tapes and concluded that approximately 2,500 of the approximately 3,200 emails that Philipp testified during the first trial were deleted between March 23 and March 28, 2007 (prior to the dumpster being in place), were not, in fact, deleted, explaining that “there [were] various technical explanations why Mr. Philipp could not find them on the tape the first time.” Id. at 719. The government dropped Philipp from its witness list, halted all efforts to prove the March 23-28 deletions, and moved to strike parts of the indictment relating to those deletions.”