Opinion ID: 613369
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Impeachment by Third-Party Conviction

Text: Gansman asserts that the District Court improperly prohibited him from cross-examining Murdoch about her father's previous securities fraud convictions. According to Gansman, introducing the conviction was necessary to elicit that Murdoch had visited her father in jail and it was painful and awful and [going to jail is] something she's willing to avoid at all costs. Gansman's claims are without merit. Rule 609 of the Federal Rules of Evidence provides that evidence that a witness . . . has been convicted of a crime shall be admitted, subject to Rule 403, if the crime was punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year, and evidence that any witness has been convicted of a crime shall be admitted regardless of punishment, if it readily can be determined that establishing the elements of the crime required proof or admission of an act of dishonesty or false statement by a witness. Fed. R. Evid. 609(emphases supplied). This Rule does not provide for the introduction of a third party's prior conviction as a proper subject of cross-examination, especially when that conviction creates a prejudicial inference that the witness is disposed to act in a certain way or is otherwise closely associated with criminality. Perhaps not surprisingly, when the District Court invited Gansman's able counsel to provide it with case law in support of the idea that a witness may be impeached with the prior conviction of another, he was unable to do so. [13] Finally, as the District Court noted at trial, evidence about the convictions of Murdoch's father was not necessary for Gansman to argue that Murdoch had an incentive to lie in order to stay out of jail. Accordingly, we hold that the District Court did not abuse its discretion in determining that the relevance of Murdoch's father's past was outweighed by the potentially prejudicial effect on the jury. Curley, 639 F.3d at 56.