People v. Criscione (1981) 125 Cal.App.3d 275 was a case in which the prosecutor improperly set himself up as an expert. The defendant in that case, who was ethnically a southern Italian, killed his girlfriend; the real controversy at trial centered upon his mental state. During both the guilt and penalty phases of trial, the prosecutor engaged in extensive cross examination of defense psychiatrists to which defense counsel objected. The cross-examinations all insinuated that mental illness is often feigned, that the defendant's violent attitudes relating to women were merely the normal responses of a man raised in a traditional Italian culture and that, if released, he was likely to kill again. To take one of many examples, when commenting upon the testimony of an expert witness that paranoia often results in the use of a double standard, the prosecutor, who was himself also an Italian-American, stated that "'the double standard is part of the fact of life of people of particular ethnic extraction, for years and years and years. I hope my wife doesn't hear me say that. But that's not a sign of manicness. What we have here is a man who has come from a society--and don't get me wrong, please. Italians have degrees of society and there are degrees of attitudes, and people change. But generally speaking, in the European, the traditional European society, women are not given equal treatment.'" (Id. at p. 289.) As the court observed, "having thus placed before the jury throughout the trial his own irrelevant and spurious opinions, the prosecutor in closing argument in the sanity phase condensed and presented them to the jury as a logical basis for the conclusion that, in killing his victim, appellant was not suffering from any mental disease, but merely acting out a common Southern Italian masculine role." (Id. at p. 289.)