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BOISE • Deputy Prosecutor Erica Kallin might have stirred up enough racism to influence a jury’s verdict when she recited opening lines of “Dixie,” the Confederate anthem, in her closing argument against James D. Kirk, the Idaho Court of Appeals has found.

Kallin, of Canyon County, didn’t mean to invoke race, county spokesman Joe Decker said in early December. She was improvising her argument, he said, because the defense attorney already had told jurors what she planned to say in her closing.

That’s beside the point, Appeals Court Judge Karen Lansing wrote.

“This prosecutor may not have intended to appeal to racial bias, but a prosecutor’s mental state, however innocent, does not determine the message received by the jurors or their individual responses to it,” she wrote, with agreement by fellow Judges David Gratton and John Melanson. “An invocation of race by a prosecutor, even if subtle and oblique, may be violative of due process or equal protection.”

In April 2013, Kallin paraphrased from “Dixie” to warn jurors to heed the evidence against Kirk, a black man accused of lewd conduct with a 17-year-old girl and sexual battery of a 13-year-old girl.