reserve about five minutes for mr shand to make some points in rebuttal your honour's when dr wong changed the manner of death determination in his autopsy report and wrote homicide that word homicide had the exact same meaning as lois killed allen it was not homicide by some unknown person lois was the only suspect ever given it doesn't appear in that her name doesn't appear in the autopsy report your honor however it appears all over the corner case notes lois is the person who detective perty contacted dr wong about more than two dozen times over the course of the summer to give him derogatory information about her lois is the person that detective petite prompted dr wong to change the manner of death because she was homicide if if lois didn't kill allen then it was an accident by definition because a man is a death the potential manners of death were accidental homicide natural suicide and we knew it wasn't natural and we knew it wasn't suicide so if lois didn't kill alan then by definition it was an accident and in fact dr wong he argued throughout the trial two things he argue that number one whether lois still valid wasn't relevant even though homicide in this case manager back of the same thing and then number two he spent a lot of time in trial actually trying to prove that lois did in fact kill allen he refused to stipulate before trial that lois didn't kill alan they asked questions of lois on cross examination to insinuate that she killed alan doctors fear of the expert  dr wong and detective petite all testified that as of today or the date of the trial it was still their opinion that this was a homicide in other words it was still their opinion that lois killed down and so despite all this the district court excluded evidence that went to the heart of the case the heart of our case was lois did not kill and therefore the statement and the what about today you still think this was murder and the detective said it was one hundred percent certain that it was murder as of today and so it was if they were still thinking as of today their position as of today as of the day the clothes that mrs goodman was wearing none of mr goodmans d n a was on any of this clothing which was collected and tested in this was but the jury was was aware that the charges against mrs goodman had been dismissed that's correct and as a matter of fact your honor the they made a point of bringing out from the detective and i believe the district attorney that they were dismissed without prejudice meaning that they were still free to refile the charges against mrs goodman cause of death none of that was allowed your honor in fact when dr wong testified in response to my questioning whether he still believed it was homicide at that point i attempted to ask him about whether he was aware that there was d n a testing  prepared i don't think that's correct i don't think they were i think all of that was excluded and certainly the results were excluded which is the most important thing in proving that lowest did not kill ounce of the d n a results were excluded and by excluding the d n a results lois was prevented from proving number one that the autopsy report was false i mean that's that's  the st thing you have to prove if you're going to prove a false statement or a falsification by material emissions the st thing you have to prove is that it's false that homicides not true by excluding the d n a evidence alone prevented us from prov the conclusion of homicide was false and then in addition to that there was a whole lot of evidence of material omissions that were excluded such as the the admission of the fingerprint evidence that mrs goodmans fingerprints were not on the mug the judge excluded that the district court concluded that there was testimony by the district attorney's crime scene expert who they brought in from oklahoma to look at the crime scene he opined in his deposition that there was no evidence that mrs goodman was even home at the time allen goodman died and that was excluded district court refused to allow us to examine dr wong on issues that this court had previously said were relevant this court previously said that the fact that dr wong changed the manner of d homicide without explaining why a reasonable jury could rely on the name standards the h thirty one standards that say you've got to explain why a reasonable jury could rely on that in finding that he falsified the report and the district court precluded us from asking dr wong about the name standards the district court precluded us from asking dr wong about the many issues that he left out of the autopsy report saying that the report spoke for itself and that the jury would get the report and they could look at it and make their own determination the the court prevented us from cross examining dr wong's primary expert dr fiero who came in from virginia who was a very well known medical examiner she came in from virginia she said it's still her opinion and it was her opinion in twenty thousand one hundred and forty two years after the events that this was a homicide and she went she went forward with you know she gave her opinion why and she did an accident reconstruction and we were prevented from  asking her what her qualifications were to testify as an accident reconsider reconstruction specialist she testified that she relied on two other medical examiner reports and coming up with her opinions one of those reports was the report again that this court referred to specifically in this memorandum opinion the last time we were on summary judgment the report that said that dr wong report was and i want to quote it accurately it was defective and far outside national guidelines we weren't allowed to ask dr fierro about that even though she said that she relied on that report and forming her opinions and finally the court imposed a what appeared to be a very arbitrary and and turned out to be a very inflexible twelve hour time limit which was then leveraged into once the court sort of realized that  a evidence probably was highly relevant to that time limit the fact that we were running up against that kind of leverage into the court's decision not to allow us to pursue the d n a issue and and so your honour's in conclusion the errors that the district court made and excluding all this evidence evidence that was critical to mrs goodmans case went to the heart of our case it was a manifest abuse of discretion  impacted the jury's decision and for those reasons this court should reverse the judgment and remain this case for a new trial thank you detail why these challenges you must challenge her rulings on the part of the district court none of them lay beyond the pale of reasonable justification which is the standard for abuse of discussion articulated by this court taking the d n a evidence for sed the test results that was the decision to exclude was in the context of a rule for three probative value of the evidence does not mean that it's not relevant as soon as it has some relevance but the question is how much value it has in relation to other considerations the trial court the district court thought mrs goodman guilt or innocence was not the central issue but whether the autopsy report was defensible which is what the th circuit said in the st appeal whether it met standards a result deficient that it should be deemed false a vacation probative value depends on other evidence for example is there other evidence that would take less time to put on there was other evidence of that was exculpatory there was the evidence of the officer on the scene who saw no evidence of foul play and it was st deemed an accident there was the evidence that the district attorney dismissed the charges because she had two experts who said this fellow fell and that was the reason he died the jury heard that they also heard that manner of death conclusions are judgment calls they heard that from plaintiff's expert that pathologists can disagree on the manner of death on the very same facts so the jury had that in mind and  when the judge decided the probative value was not enough to outweigh the time that it would take to put on this d n a of d n a evidence he was correct and it is interesting to me that pla brief that putting on this d n a evidence would have been very time consuming there were collection issues that was collected five days after the event it was found in the trash who knows how it ha been handled and so forth plaintive in his reply brief admits you would need expert testimony on this and it would quote add time and complexity to the trial so the t was time that didn't need to be spent on that and in fact if you read the record through the tugun the whole trial is to keep focused on the autopsy report and not stray off into asking the jury to determine the guilt or innocence of mrs goodman in addition to play it made no showing of prejudice if the jury had known about the d n a results the question would be would it probably have found the report falsified the d n a the fact that it had to be disclosed did it have to be disclosed to prevent homicide from being misleading i would like to say that homicide doesn't necessarily equate to as planned you said lois killed allen homicide means not accident on the side means not suicide homicide means not natural causes those were the choices it means not undetermined the change was from we don't know what caused the staff to homicide that but then surely wasn't the chief medical examiner  done regarding this investigation i think there was a general question is whether d n a can sometimes turn up in an autopsy report but i don't recall that specific question the question is if the jury had known that the d n a tests and what they said i think it is just as likely that they would have found no faults of occasion to admit result th didn't exist the d n a results didn't exist until a month after the report issued the report issued in august i think plain just brief i was looking at the sites on wait for the results but the jury never even reached that in question they never reached his kind of a state of mind or reckless or intentional whatever they just said there were there was nothing omitted the air that needed to be in there to make the conclusion misleading and they had they could have believed mrs goodman did not kill her husband on the basis of the other evidence they had that that the officers are north on so foul play that the charges were dismissed that other people thought it was an accident they couldn't believe that and still found no false a vacation and particularly when how do you falsify a result when the result the results the d n a results come out a month later how is omitting them a false a vacation when they hadn't even they weren't even in existence at that point so we think there was no abuse of discretion on that point and i was interested on the other things that that what sort of touched on here  dr wong wasn't allowed to talk about the contents of the the autopsy report yes he was if the questions were framed correctly he answered he testified for example certain injuries described were consistent with a fall but he didn't say so explicitly he he said that the d m a require documentation about the absence of defensive ones he thought he had documented it by drawing it by leaving blanks on the back of hands for example the diagram was documentation for that plane of argues in the reply that it's not about standards this was about the th amendment well it is about standards in the opening brief plaintiff quoted the th circuit after the st appeal holding that evidence dr want failed to adhere to minimum standards would support a finding of falsify cation and it said again he needed those standards because they were crucial so if this was about sinners but there was nothing in that in his arguments about dr wayne's testimony about the name standards about timing and so forth showing that the jury would probably have ruled differently on the basic fact thoughts of vacation had things gone differently for him and on the time factor i would like to say i don't really understand their argument because in the reply he said he only gave me thirty minutes to finish my case well the judge asked him to how much time do you need to finish with the witnesses he said thirty minutes and it got an hour for argument that wasn't included in the twelve hour of up and so i don't understand the complaint there basically i think this is a case where a judge was working extremely hard to keep it on back that there was nothing in his decisions that warrant is being called beyond the pale of reasonable justification is decisions were reasonable you could disagree with them but they were reasonable but there is no showing anywhere of prejudice that we were acquire a reversal so we asked the court to affirm and if there are no questions i submit i thank you thank you honor of being here for one of judge prager son's last arguments from one of his last opinions and i think it is important when we consider this case to consider what this court has already ruled on this case first of all as judge prater some pointed out this isn't a run of the mill case in his opinion he pointed out that this is the case of the lady from woodland hills who was arrested in new york city at the u n u s tennis open she was put on national t v she was paraded around they put her in rikers island and they took her to l a county jail and it was just a horrific experience what has been pointed out is that although d may not have caused all of that directly dr wong that when he changed when he changed the cause of death to homicide he knew that lois goodman was going to be arrested and that is clear from the record dollars created by the national association of medical examiners requiring a coroner to provide a reason for the change in the cause of death it would seem to me that when this court tells the district court that the national association of medical examiner standards are relevant to this case that the district court should follow what this court has already ruled instead the district court i went out and created a ruling of its own and excluded the name standards after this court had said the name standards are important to this court said the doctor ones were porch only needed evidence that allen's injury was consistent it was in one of the exhibits i think it off the top of my head i think it's exhibit thirty eight and the judge would not allow us to use thirty eight dollars there was no mention of these standards but the judge an accidental fall over and over again we asked to be allowed to bring in evidence that alan's injury was consistent with an accidental fall but we want to allow to cross examine dr wong about his report the district judge several of the reports speaks for itself we haven't seen that before but that's what the district court ruled we were not allowed another thing that we had we had mrs goodman testify and i confess to primarily being a state court trial lawyer and i've tried a number of homicide cases down there and this is goodman testified that she didn't kill her husband and yet five witnesses testified that they believe that she did kill her husband and those five witnesses were the investigating officer detective particular so it is one hundred percent certain two years later after all the evidence comes any one hundred percent certain  dr fierro they all said that they could they continue to believe it's a homicide so what we have is we have we have a seventy year old woman or she's probably seventy five at the time of the trial  she's left there on her own we can't bring in anything that exculpates her we can't bring in the d n a we can't bring in the blood we can't bring in the fingernail analysis we can't bring in any of the documentary evidence that we would ordinarily bring in on a homicide case and what happened was the district court treated this have as a medical malpractise case when in fact it was a homicide case the jury was asked to determine its st question was is the autopsy report false that is when it says it's a homicide is it false the jury came back and said we cannot conclude that that is false therefor despite what my learned probably says the jury found that mrs good with a jury was unable to find that mrs goodman did not kill her husband my colleague representing dr i'm sorry over time so you can i will gladly wrap up it is an honor to be here i hope we follow the prior opinion from this court i hope we find that the district court failed to and i hope we remain and for a new trial in the