People v. Rosales

The issue we are confronted with in this case is whether a defendant is entitled to reversal of his conviction when the prosecutor takes advantage of a bench trial and injects several errors into the proceeding that he admittedly would not have injected into a jury trial, and the judge is silent as to those errors. We hold that although error is less likely to be harmful at a bench trial, the prosecutor’s duty to promote justice and avoid error is nonetheless as imperative as it is in a jury trial.

Following a bench trial in Monroe Circuit Court, defendant, Ruben Rosales, was convicted of four…