Opinion ID: 613010
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Recorded Telephone Conversation

Text: Mubayyid also challenges the admissibility of a recorded telephone conversation between himself and the executive director of GRF, Mohammed Chehade, in which he declined the advice to remove Care's documents from a storage unit in response to the FBI's investigation of Care. In the telephone call, Mubayyid informs Chehade that the FBI had attempted to search Care's former offices. The relevant portion of the call was as follows: Chehade: What did you have? Did you have things? Mubayyid: Actually, we had already moved, we were not there. . . . We had moved our effects to uh-wha do you call it? To storage. . . . Chehade: Alright. What do you have? Storage? What-what do you have for storage? Take the things out of storage. Mubayyid: They were originally locked, in- in- in-, uh, in- the ugh- the office, and we moved them to the storage. . . . Chehade: Remove them. Mubayyid: It need uh, one is afraid that they may think that there is something, I mean Chehade: No. Mubayyid: I don't want to touch anything so that there is no. Chehade: No, no, no, remove them, remove them. The government introduced the conversation to show that, notwithstanding his statement to the contrary at the time, Mubayyid ultimately removed and destroyed documents from the storage unit, evidencing his consciousness of guilt. To that end, the government tied this conversation to evidence indicating that three particularly damning documents, one of which involved GRF, had been removed from the storage unit between the time of the FBI's covert search in October 2001 and the time of the FBI's subsequent search in April 2003. It also explained this theory of the evidence to the jury in closing argument. Appropriately, the district court instructed the jury that it could not consider Chehade's statements for the truth of the matter asserted, and that the conversation was being offered to show the impact upon Mubayyid. The evidence was admissible for this limited purpose. Cf. United States v. Walter, 434 F.3d 30, 34 (1st Cir.2006) (concluding that informer's out-of-court statements during taped sting were admissible as context for defendant's taped responsive admissions). In any event, the admission of this phone conversation was harmless. [A] non-constitutional evidentiary issue will be treated as harmless if it is highly probable that the error did not contribute to the verdict. United States v. Rose, 104 F.3d 1408, 1414 (1st Cir.1997). At trial, the government introduced evidence that the storage unit was rented by Mubayyid and remained under his control during the time between the two FBI searches. It further showed that many of Care's documents were retrieved from Mubayyid's residence during the 2003 search, that the documents in question were not recovered from either the storage unit or the residence, and that the storage unit contained a paper shredder in 2003 that had not been present in 2001. Thus, the government had substantial other evidence from which it could have asked the jury to draw the same conclusion. Moreover, by choosing to demonstrate consciousness of guilt as it didi.e., by emphasizing that Mubayyid had been asked to remove documentsthe government necessarily highlighted for the jury that Mubayyid, in fact, refused to do so. For these reasons, it is highly probable that the introduction of the challenged phone conversation and the prosecutor's reference to it in closing argument did not contribute to the verdict.