Opinion ID: 781722
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 8

Heading: Admission of Government's Fingerprint Evidence and Telephone Call Charts

Text: 394 Ismoil argues that it was an abuse of the District Court's discretion to admit into evidence comparisons made of Ismoil's latent fingerprints found on items at the Pamrapo Apartment and latent fingerprints found on innocuous personal documents Ismoil was known to have handled. He argues that, because the Government also introduced comparisons made of the Pamrapo Apartment latent fingerprints with direct fingerprints taken by the Jordanian officials who arrested Ismoil, the latent-to-latent comparisons were irrelevant and cumulative and served only to bolster and exaggerate the Government's evidence against Ismoil, in violation of Federal Rules of Evidence 402 and 403. Ismoil also challenges the admission of a fingerprint card created by the Jordanian officials because it contained only Arabic writing and may have misled the jury into thinking that Ismoil had a criminal record in Jordan. Finally, Ismoil challenges the Government's use of charts to highlight certain patterns of telephone calls that were culled from a two-binder set of telephone-record summaries that was given to the jury. None of these arguments has merit. 395 We will not hold that a district court's evidentiary rulings were an abuse of discretion unless the decision was manifestly erroneous, SKW Metals & Alloys, Inc., 195 F.3d at 87-88, and the error was not harmless, see Khalil, 214 F.3d at 122. Those standards are not met here. 396 As the Government points out, Ismoil's counsel—in his opening statement—challenged the integrity of the Government's procedures in collecting evidence by referring to a recent, altogether different case in which it was discovered that the authorities had planted fingerprints to incriminate defendants. WTr. at 64-65. In addition, a defense expert provided extensive testimony about perceived flaws and inadequacies in the Government's procedures for collecting and analyzing evidence. See, e.g., WTr. at 5035-43, 5045-49, 5077-81. By putting forth these statements, the defendants placed the integrity of the Government's evidence-gathering procedures at issue, thereby making relevant evidence concerning the investigative process through which Ismoil was identified and connected to the case. 397 We also reject Ismoil's speculation that the jury might have interpreted the Arabic writing on the fingerprint card as evidence of a criminal record. Ismoil could have sought to cure any such asserted misimpression by raising that specific objection and requesting a limiting instruction, but failed to do so. 398 Ismoil's argument that the Government's use of telephone summary charts violated Federal Rule of Evidence 1006 71 is baseless because the Government was (and Ismoil, if he had so chosen, would have been) entirely within its rights to use charts to draw the jurors' attention to particular evidence culled from a voluminous set of records. We have regularly affirmed the use of such charts. See, e.g., United States v. Casamento, 887 F.2d 1141, 1149-50 (2d Cir.1989); United States v. Pinto, 850 F.2d 927, 935 (2d Cir.1988); United States v. Baccollo, 725 F.2d 170, 173 (2d Cir.1983). Moreover, any possible prejudice was cured by the District Court's limiting instruction stating that the charts were not evidence; they were only graphic demonstrations of the underlying evidence, and the jury had to determine for itself whether they fairly and accurately summarized the underlying evidence. 399 Accordingly, we find no abuse of discretion in the District Court's admission of this evidence. 400