good morning to the court the morning posing counsel my name is jeffrey jensen and i represent your party williams are its appeal mr williams was accused of numerous things but pertinent to this appeal  he was accused of sex trafficking three different women and as a government points out on a spree if there was literally a mountain of evidence that mr williams was in fact involved in prostitut with these women but what converts this from a garden variety prostitution case to a serious federal crime is the fact that allegedly fraud and or coercion was used i think recognizing that the government and april of last year filed a notice of a expert witness the expert witness was an f b i agent amy menzel who's got extensive experience investigating and prosecuting sex trafficking and human trafficking cases and i hesitate to make categorical statements because it invites the court to prove me wrong but i will anyway  but didn't tell us at all what her testimony would actually be it's a very sort of notice that the court found in insufficient and duvall consulates assume that they agree with you and that type of the prejudice that was actually my next line is this is you know i am i understand that the monumental obstacle that mr williams needs to assail in this appeal is to address the issue that back there if it was there not prejudicial and talking specifically about the insufficient notice of expert testimony there are two sorts of prejudice that he suffered because of that the first one is not knowing what agent menzel testimony actually is going to be it was impossible for me i was also his trial where it was impossible for me to articulate a specific objection that i had to the testimony because i didn't know what it was going to be and it also hindered the district judge in ruling on my objection because at the kind the judge ruled on my objection he also cared and heard agent mansell's testimony so it was in the abstract the judge said well you know this is a huge sex trafficking case and the ins and the outs and the what the ad use of sex trafficking is not something that the average person knows about so it seems to me that agent menzel testimony might be helpful for the jury and i agree with that as far as it goes but to decide this case the jury did need to know the ins in the outs and what have  sex trafficking because the important issue that the jury needs to decide was whether there was fraud and whether there was coercion or coercion and these are concepts that everybody preparation prejudice yet but assuming that i would had been made aware of what aging mendel's testimony was and assuming i could articulate a cogent objection to it and that the district judge was aware of what the objection was and what the statement was that at that testimony would not have been submitted to the jury which brings me to the second issue i raised in the brief which whether substantive substantive the testimony that preceded her testimony i have to say i don't recall exactly there were a lot of agents coming in and out of the court during which she sequestered or was she excluded in any way i have to just honestly say i don't remember ok second question then is she's testified before in many cases correct i think she testified she testified her testimony during this trial was that she had testified on two earlier a to earlier occasions where were you able to see her testimony reader testimony in those cases i did not get those cases i didn't know you didn't know what they were i didn't know what they were so no i didn't see what her testimony was going back to the prejudice of the imprint deficient notice it also impaired my ability to prepare for trial in terms of not knowing she what she was going to say i couldn't prepare a cross examination i literally had to find out what she was going to say and then attempt to cross examine her basically on the fly i did the best i could and and the point of the cross examination had to do with she admitted that she was basically rooting for the government and that the testimony she was giving was intended to help persuade the jury that williams  working for him but that was the best i could do which brings me to the second issue which is substantively whether this testimony was helpful to the jury i touched on it a minute ago that the jury doesn't need or didn't need to know the ins in the outs of sex trafficking in order to decide this case this was something the issues that age and mental talked about are issues that we all are intimately philip familiar with from our daily lives fraud she talked about the pimp will offer houses and restaurants cars and things of that nature and then not follow through with it well that that's a matter of common knowledge  menzel testified that that pimps will use violence and a culture of violence in order to coerce the women into doing what he wants again i mean we're all familiar that if you beat somebody up that has a chorus of effect this was all things that are are matters of common knowledge so it was not necessary for the government to present it so how the palace of prejudicial here's you're basically saying the jury what they already knew here's how it was prejudicial it's prejudicial because it is in effect arguing you know the witness took everything every item of evidence that the government williams wearing a milwaukee brewers hat and she said and pimps and human traffickers where milwaukee brewers has because the n b a stands for money over bitches that to me judge is argument and the second reason this pressure to show is because it is group character trait i mean which i admit that rule four zero four doesn't back and it has feathers and web feet you know that's the same thing that this expert witness did in this case human here's what a human traffickers looks like he makes promises he doesn't keep he coerces his women he where is where is milwaukee brewers act and lo and behold the government presented testimony that that's what mr williams looked like so that's why i think it's pretty disclosure and despite what defense counsel said it identified that she had testified previously to federal sex trafficking trials and the united states provided the citations to those  because rational agent mental was not testifying to an ultimate conclusion or opinion in this case no ultimate opinion or conclusion was required to be disclosed it was clear from the expert disclosure that pimps and prostitutes and its attendant terminology and this court as well as other federal courts have uniformly held that in these types of key said educational expert testimony regarding the background of sex trafficking and that it dynamics of pimps and prostitutes is appropriate and this is so because by and large this information is not well known it's not hamman knowledge let's go back to rule sixteen for a minute rule sixteen says that the government is required to give a written summary of the testimony not a list of the topics or just to take just to take one of your  say what they are you just say that's the topic that she's going to testify about how does that comply with sixteen your honor in this case i would say it adequately summarized her general testimony and all the rule doesn't specifically address the differences between educational or background testimony as opposed to scientific or complicated as expert testimony that reaches an ultimate conclusion or opinion in the case the advisory committee notes to rule sixteen explicitly address a case such as that and it explains that there's going to be a difference between an expert disclosure and where the expert will be providing background information on a particular issue or an expert who will actually offer an opinion and it states that the expert notice will reflect such a decision and in this case the defense h in additional sentence added to the disclosure for example stating there are two types of pens and ask him or romeo pym as opposed to a gorilla pen how that additional gran detail what has somehow affected his preparation both pretrial or at trial and defense counsel challenge expert challenge special agent mental expert testimony and various and numerous grounds pretrial he didn't write to the court in his motion and say i'm completely caught off guard your honor i need a sheering immediately i need an adjournment i need a continuance i need to do you know additional information from the government in order to adequately move to exclude it as this right but that the judge says we're going to put that off until trial so then when they introduce a trial that's his first opportunity to really argue to the judge with the witness there that she should be excluded at that point she's already on the stand why i have to have you defend the fact that he didn't conduct some sort of war dear of this witness pretrial so that he could make the decision then and at least counsel would have a preview of the witness's testimony and be able to repair his own cross examination and perhaps even consider c your on or in this case the defense file do they know it piled the motion excluding back for testimony and various different grounds he challenge the sufficiency of the notice and at that time he also challenge her testimony stating that it was not based upon statistical evidence was not subject to peer review was not relevant i mean he she has her expert testimony in various ways at the final pretrial conference and the judge made the decision that he would not be ruling on the motion until until the commencement of trial and that's time the defense counsel had not even filed a reply brief he had not even responded to the united states his response brief alerting the judge that this was somehow hampering you know completely hampering his ability to adequately challenge her testimony both you know pretrial and a trial and dear of this witness he declines to do so he did not make the argument that he needed a continuance or some type of the journeymen in order to obtain you know additional information before proceeding the judge again while we entered into arguments that morning about why their or her testimony should be excluded he did not present additional authority when asked by the judge he relied upon what was in his brief and said it was a discovery violation and then he stated his four or four impermissible character i wouldn't argument he didn't rely on other arguments and he certainly didn't ask for any other relief that could have been granted and the job you know having a bearing that in mind and reading the case law that i cited that these types of this type of testimony is frankly uniformly admitted in these types of cases agreed to allow session helpful to the jury in terms of understanding an area subculture frankly very dark subculture that most jurors would not have any information about while it was helpful in this century translating the victim's testimony the witnesses testimony for the jury and translating and in certain respects mr williams his own words and his facebook messages it was not the  evidence in this case was overwhelming the jury saw and heard about mr williams a sex trafficking operation from numerous witnesses including the victims themselves the jury saw and heard about mr williams is brutal demoralizing humiliating beatings of these women so at the end of the day the advocates was overwhelming and special agent mentals testimony testified that she did not know the facts of this case did she sit through trial she did not she was sequestered your honor and she was cross examined about her knowledge her prior knowledge of the facts of this case extensively and she testified that she did not participate in this investigation she did not know mr williams personally and she was testifying beast upon her training experience in investigating other  trial mr jensen crossed examined her thoroughly he cross examined her about her expertise he cross examined her about her motivations as you noted he got her to admit i possibly emanation that she was rooting for the government in this case because she was that b i e john and that's something that he this he argued in his closing argument as well and so this idea that because the the the notice could have included an extra sentence explaining you know in granular detail what she was going to testify about while at the same time he's arguing this is all common knowledge everybody knew what it was the defense can't have it both ways and at the end of the day your honor any error was harmless thank your honour's thank you counsel mr jensen you have a little bit of time le will i want to address the government's argument that this of course as seems like it always is was the defense lawyers fault for not jumping up on the table and pounding his shoe and demanding relief i mean the way this happened was they filed the notice the rule sixteen notice i believe it was only three days later i saw the response to that notice saying it's in it's insufficient doesn't tell me what the testimony years and then the government did respond to that but what they didn't do is firm up the notice and tell me what agent mendel's testimony was going to be i brought it up to the judge at the final pretrial conference i brought it up at the start of the trial and was put off i brought it up at the start of agent mendel's testimony and was put off i brought it up several times during that time counseled me about yes during her testimony and only when the judge got sick and tired of hearing from me friendly conduct this hearing so i don't think it was my fault thank you counsel the case is taken under advi