Opinion ID: 204415
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Admissible Testimony

Text: Possession-with-intent-to-distribute cases require prosecutors to prove that a defendant possessed the drugs for distribution rather than for personal use. See, e.g., United States v. Maher, 454 F.3d 13, 23 (1st Cir.2006); United States v. Reynoso, 336 F.3d 46, 49 (1st Cir.2003); United States v. Valle, 72 F.3d 210, 214 (1st Cir. 1995). To help prove that here, prosecutors turned to task force member Michael Naylor. After discussing his long experience in drug enforcement and his intimate familiarity with the heroin world, Naylor testified without objection that a single gram of heroin yields 50 dosesthus the heroin seized from Polanco's Camry alone was enough for almost 5,000 doses. To cement the prosecution's distribution position and undercut any claim of personal use, Naylor testified that a typical heroin addict may do 3-5 doses a day. A heavy user may do 10-20 doses a day. Anything above that could kill a person. Actually, Naylor added, he knew two people who died after doing 50 doses. Polanco spends a lot of time trying to convince us that Naylor's 50-doses-may-kill-you comment was irrelevant and unduly prejudicial. See Fed.R.Evid. 401, 403. If properly preserved, these issues trigger abuse-of-discretion review, see, e.g., United States v. Gonzalez-Melendez, 594 F.3d 28, 34 (1st Cir.2010); United States v. Griffin, 818 F.2d 97, 101-02 (1st Cir.1987)if unpreserved, plain-error review takes over, see, e.g., United States v. Nelson-Rodriguez, 319 F.3d 12, 34 (1st Cir.2003). The government wonders whether Polanco did enough to preserve either issue. We need not wrestle with that question, however. Even giving Polanco the benefit of the doubt on the preservation point, we find no fault with the judge's discretionary calls. Relevant evidence, Rule 401 says, is evidence having any tendency to make the existence of any fact that is of consequence to the determination of the action more probable or less probable than it would be without the evidence. Clearly, whether Polanco had the heroin for distribution or personal use was a matter of consequence at trial. See, e.g., Maher, 454 F.3d at 23; Reynoso, 336 F.3d at 49; Valle, 72 F.3d at 214. And the range of daily doses that Naylor said an average heroin addict could usefrom light to heavy to death-inducinghelped prove a pivotal point: that the huge amounts of heroin involved here were consistent with distribution as opposed to personal use. Cf., e.g., Maher, 454 F.3d at 23; Reynoso, 336 F.3d at 49; Valle, 72 F.3d at 214. The long and short of it is that Naylor's testimony easily satisfied the not-too-hard-to-meet relevancy standard. Polanco fares no better on his undue-prejudice claim. For the reasons just given, Naylor's testimony was plainly probative on the distributive-intent issue. No doubt, the testimony was prejudicial, in the sense that it showed that the amounts of heroin were too large to represent personal use. But it was not unfairly so, particularly since Naylor never intimated a possible suggestion that Polanco had supplied heavy heroin users or had caused overdoses or deaths. Rarely will we override a judge's balancing of relevance and prejudice, see, e.g., United States v. Winchenbach, 197 F.3d 548, 559 (1st Cir.1999), and we see no reason to second-guess the judge's discretionary judgment here.