How have the courts interpreted comments made by a prosecutor in her closing argument?

Appellants challenge several comments. When read in context, the first challenged statement cannot be fairly characterized as a comment on appellants' failure to testify. Rather, the prosecutor was responding to defense counsel's suggestion that the Government was asking the jury to do something "un-American" when she asked them to consider whether the defendants' post-arrest statements were lies. Furthermore, the prosecutor was clarifying that, despite defense counsel's suggestion to the contrary, she had not been referring to the defendants' failure to testify in her closing argument, but instead, was referring to their post-arrest statements. When fairly construed, the statements do not appear to have been "manifestly intended to call attention to [appellants'] failure to testify"; nor were they "of such a character that the jury would naturally and necessarily take [them] to be a comment on the failure to testify." ⁴ See United States v. Hoac, 990 F.2d 1099, 1104 (9th Cir.1993) (internal quotations omitted), cert. denied, 114 S.Ct. 1075 (1994); see also United States v. Robinson, 485 U.S. 25, 26-32 (1988) (although it is impermissible for a prosecutor, on his or her own initiative, to ask the jury to draw an inference from a defendant's silence, there is no Fifth Amendment violation where the prosecutor's reference is a fair response to a claim by the defense).