Opinion ID: 792809
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Lawrence Stewart's testimony

Text: 75 Defendants each seek a new trial or, in the alternative, an evidentiary hearing, based on alleged prejudice arising from the introduction of false testimony given by the Government's expert witness. 76 During its case in chief, the Government called Lawrence F. Stewart, 6 a civilian employee of the United States Secret Service and its Laboratory Director and Chief Forensic Scientist, to give an expert opinion regarding the worksheet that Bacanovic described in his testimony before the SEC as having been prepared on December 20th when he and Stewart reviewed her portfolio. The worksheet is a one-page document that listed each stock in Stewart's personal Merrill Lynch account and identified the market price as well as its unrealized gain or loss in position. Various handwritten notations, including circles, checks, and stock symbols appear on the page. In addition, to the right of the entry describing ImClone was the notation @60. Bacanovic testified on February 13, 2002, that the document demonstrated that Stewart sold her stock on December 27th pursuant to an earlier decision to liquidate if the per share price dropped to $60. 77 The original worksheet was sent to the Secret Service Forensic Services Division (FSD) where the ink that produced the handwritten notations was analyzed. At trial, Lawrence described himself as the only national expert for ink. He testified that laboratory tests were performed — first in July and August 2002, and again in January 2004 — to determine whether the ink used in the @60 notation was consistent with the ink in other notations on the page. Lawrence testified that the test results led him to conclude that the ink used to make the @60 notation, which appeared next to the ImClone entry, differed from the ink used to make the other notations that he was able to test, all of which had been made with a type of Paper Mate pen. The Government offered Lawrence's testimony to demonstrate that the @60 notation was not contemporaneous with the other notations on the page and therefore tended to prove that Bacanovic altered the document and that he and Stewart concocted the @60 stop-loss order story after the fact when the flaws in the tax loss story came to light. 78 The defense offered the testimony of Dr. Albert Lyter, a forensic chemist specializing in the analysis of inks and papers. There was little disagreement in the two experts' conclusions. Both testified that it was likely that the marks other than the @60 and a small dash at the end of the Apple Computer entry had been produced by a Paper Mate pen, that the ink used to make the @60 mark was unusual and from an unidentifiable source, and that the timing of the various marks could not be determined reliably through testing. Lyter's conclusion, however, departed from Lawrence's in two respects. First, Lyter concluded that the @60 notation and the Apple Computer dash had been made by the same pen, whereas Lawrence concluded that the @60 ink differed from the ink used for other notations on the page but, because he had not tested the dash, he had made no conclusion regarding its source. Second, Lyter testified that use of a device known as a densitometer revealed batch variations, which indicated that at least two different ball point pens had been used to make the remaining notations on the page. The Government recalled Lawrence to answer questions about the use of densitometry. He testified that the densitometer was not sufficiently accurate to ascertain variations among different batches of the same ink recipe with reasonable reliability. 79 Several months after the jury returned its verdict, the Government announced that an investigation had revealed that Lawrence had made false material statements in the testimony he gave in Stewart's and Bacanovic's trial. He was indicted on June 9, 2004 on two counts of perjury in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1623 relating to his testimony that he had personally participated in the forensic tests about which he testified and that he was familiar with a book proposal drafted by his colleagues, and knew that it included a chapter on densitometry. 80 Defendants contend that, in light of the perjury charges, reversal of their convictions should be virtually automatic because the Government knew or should have known at the time of trial that Lawrence's testimony was false. They argue alternatively that the District Court erred in failing to hold an evidentiary hearing on the issue of the Government's knowledge. We disagree.