Opinion ID: 444351
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Telephone Chart Summaries

Text: Defendants challenge the admission into evidence of seven telephone charts depicting telephone traffic between the conspirators' homes, places of business and meeting places between May 12, 1977, and December 26, 1977, on the grounds that the foundation was inadequate, and the charts were misleading and irrelevant. The government sought introduction of records from phone companies and various motels to corroborate the testimony of their primary witness and thus buttress the evidence of the conspiracy. The substance of those calls was not known. Defendants assert that the government could not prove that the phone calls were made in furtherance of the conspiracy, particularly those that were not corroborated by the government's witness. Under Federal Rule of Evidence 401, evidence is relevant if it has 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. The phone records of calls which the government witnesses testified had been made to various members of the conspiracy during the organization and execution of the smuggles were relevant to show activity consistent with the course of the conspiracy as described by the government witnesses. A number of the phone calls depicted in the chart, however, were not supported by any testimony that a conspirator had placed or received them. Defendants, in particular, challenge eleven phone calls from a public telephone at the Holiday Inn in Staten Island in May 1977. The government contends that the Holiday Inn in Staten Island was used as a presmuggle staging area and that the presmuggle phone calls represent organizational efforts from the motel that was later to serve as the distribution point. To support this contention, they offered records showing that Drougas had taken a room at the Howard Johnson's in Danvers and that two calls were placed from his room to Karahalis, and one from his room to the Staten Island Holiday Inn on the day the calls from Staten Island were received. Two other calls were placed on the same day and previous day from the Staten Island telephone to the Concord, Massachusetts, police barracks where Ellis worked. Ellis was out sick those days, and defendants argue there is no proof that he was the intended recipient of the phone calls. Although normally we would eschew assuming a phone call placed to a place of business was intended for a particular recipient when neither the caller nor the receiver are known, here the other phone call activity from the Staten Island motel to the Danvers Howard Johnson's where Drougas was registered, from the motel to Drougas' wife's phone, and from the motel to the government witness/conspirator's phone on the days the phone calls were placed to the state police barracks support an inference that the phone calls were made in furtherance of the conspiracy. We, therefore, find that the phone calls contained in the government's chart meet the relevance standards of Rule 401 for admissibility. Although the underlying evidence was properly admitted, defendants claim that the summaries unfairly called attention to certain telephone calls and prejudiced them. Rule 1006 provides: The contents of voluminous writings, recordings or photographs which cannot conveniently be examined in court may be presented in the form of a chart, summary, or calculation. The originals, or duplicates shall be made available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at reasonable time and place. The court may order that they be produced in court. Before submitting summaries or charts for a jury's inspection, the court must find there is sufficient factual basis for admitting them and that possible prejudice or confusion does not outweigh their usefulness in clarifying the evidence. J. Weinstein and M. Berger, Weinstein's Evidence Sec. 1006 (1983). Charts and summaries are, for instance, inadmissible if they contain information not present in the original or duplicate materials on which they are based. See, e.g., Pritchard v. Liggett and Myers Tobacco Co., 295 F.2d 292, 301 (3d Cir.1961); Standard Oil of California v. Moore, 251 F.2d 188, 233 (9th Cir.1957), cert. denied, 356 U.S. 975, 78 S.Ct. 1139, 2 L.Ed.2d 1148 (1958). Care must be taken to insure that summaries accurately reflect the contents of the underlying documents and do not function as pedagogical devices that unfairly emphasize part of the proponent's proof or create the impression that disputed facts have been conclusively established or that inferences have been directly proved. See J. Weinstein and M. Berger, Weinstein's Evidence Sec. 1006 (1983). Prior to the admission of the challenged summaries, the trial court conducted an extensive voir dire on the charts' admissibility and excluded the charts because they contained argumentative inferences intermingled with direct evidence, i.e., the names of the coconspirators who inferentially made or received the calls rather than the person or company in whose name the phones were registered. The government modified the charts and again sought to introduce evidence of phone traffic between residences, places of business and public places used by the conspirators for meetings. We find that the charts as finally accepted into evidence pictorially summarized over one hundred calls placed during the period of the conspiracy and were properly received under Rule 1006. Defendants Drougas, Karahalis, and Ellis also object to the admission of two Howard Johnson's placemats on which a series of handwritten names and numbers appear. The placemats seized from Ellis' apartment in 1982 are alleged by the government to depict the rough draft breakouts of the profits of the second smuggle. Defendants claim that the documents were not shown to have been written by a conspirator and do not refer to crimes charged in this case. Rule 901 of the Federal Rules of Evidence requires that documents be authenticated or identified before they can be admitted into evidence. Authentication can be achieved through appearance, contents, substance, internal patterns, or other distinctive characteristics taken in conjunction with circumstances. Fed.R.Evid. 901(b)(4). The placemats at issue in this case were found in a conspirator's apartment, originated from the restaurant and motel chain the conspirators used as a meeting place, and depicted the first names of many of the conspirators involved in the second smuggle coupled with various four and five digit figures which were totaled. Testimony indicated that the numbers next to the word lumpers corresponded to amounts typically received by marijuana off-loaders. Ordinarily, such links might be sufficient authentication. In this case, however, where the witnesses testified that they had been involved in several smuggles besides those charged in the indictment and there was a four-year time gap between the seizure of the placemats and the alleged smuggle, authentication also required that the placemats be linked specifically to the November smuggle. To provide such temporal connection, the government called a Howard Johnson's purchasing agent of printed materials to interpret the 9/11 legend printed on a corner of the mats. The agent testified that placemats of that type and print run were distributed to Howard Johnson's restaurants between October 1977 and February 1981. Defendants urge that under United States v. Mann, 590 F.2d 361, 370 (1st Cir.1978), a mere coincidence is not sufficient basis for admitting incriminating evidence. In Mann we found that being present twice on a plane in which someone was arrested for carrying drugs was not enough to infer that a passenger knew the second courier. Here, the string of coincidences is much longer and more intricate. The source of the placemats, the circumstances surrounding their seizure, the fact that the information corresponded to other evidence of the participants in the conspiracy, and the extreme unlikelihood that such a list would be prepared by one not privy to the operation of the conspiracy provide a sufficient basis to infer that the writings pertained to the conspiracy alleged and were made in furtherance of that conspiracy. See United States v. De Gudino, 722 F.2d 1351, 1355 (7th Cir.1983); United States v. Wilson, 532 F.2d 641, 644-45 (8th Cir.), cert. denied, 429 U.S. 846, 97 S.Ct. 128, 50 L.Ed.2d 117 (1976).