Opinion ID: 196888
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: ANACS' evaluations of RCGA raw coins

Text: 18 Defendants challenge the admission of testimony concerning the grades the American Numismatic Association Certification Service (ANACS) assigned to certain coins sold by RCGA. Throughout the trial the government attempted to introduce ANACS certificates of value obtained after RCGA's bankruptcy by two dissatisfied customers, Dr. Anthony Scapicchio (Scapicchio) and Caleb Morgan (Morgan). While Morgan's coins were not the subject of any count of the indictment, Scapicchio's were the subject of Count VIII. The ANACS graders who prepared these certificates were not available for cross-examination, and, indeed, were not even identified. 19 On the fourth day of trial, the district judge conditionally admitted the certificates, based on the testimony of Richard Montgomery, director of ANACS from 1980 to 1987, concerning ANACS' valuation procedure. The next day, the judge allowed Morgan to read his certificates to the jury. The day after that, the judge excluded a similar reading by Scapicchio and struck the Morgan testimony. Finally, on the sixteenth day of trial, the court ruled that the jury is fully informed and is in a position to make a discriminating judgment about how reliable, if at all, the ANACS determinations are, and permitted a postal inspector to read the Morgan and Scapicchio certificates to the jury at the close of the government's case. Since specific objections were made to the admission of these certificates, we review for abuse of discretion. See, e.g., Cameron v. Otto Bock Orthopedic Industry, Inc., 43 F.3d 14, 16 (1st Cir.1994). 20 We find no such abuse here. The foundation for admission of a business record under Fed.R.Evid. 803(6) requires both the testimony of a qualified custodial witness and a showing that the declarant was a person with knowledge acting in the course of a regularly conducted business activity. See, e.g., Petrocelli v. Gallison, 679 F.2d 286, 290 (1st Cir.1982). Montgomery's evaluation adequately established the genesis of the records and their subsequent custody. See, e.g., Wallace Motor Sales v. American Motors Sales Corp., 780 F.2d 1049, 1061 (1st Cir.1985) (noting that the qualifying witness need not have actually prepared the record, but is simply one who can explain and be cross-examined concerning the manner in which the records are made and kept). 21 Further, we do not find that the source of information of the method or circumstances of preparation indicate lack of trustworthiness in the certificates. Fed.R.Evid. 803(6) (excluding business records on that basis); see Petrocelli, 679 F.2d at 291 (excluding business record testimony where the records were so cryptic that pure guesswork and speculation [was] required to divine the source of the cited information). It was not for the trial judge, but the jury, to determine whether the opinions in the certificates reliably assigned values to the coins. Indeed, the district court allowed the defense to conduct liberal (if not excessive) inquiry into the unreliability of the ANACS certificates. 22 Defendants also challenge the admissibility of this evidence on constitutional grounds, claiming that they were denied their Sixth Amendment right of confrontation. 2 We find Manocchio v. Moran, 919 F.2d 770 (1st Cir.1990), cert. denied, 500 U.S. 910, 111 S.Ct. 1695, 114 L.Ed.2d 89 (1991), controls our analysis in this matter. There, the government sought to enter an autopsy report about an autopsy performed by a forensic pathologist who had since moved to Israel. The testimony of another signatory to the report, the keeper of the records, was offered in order to lay the foundation for admission. Id. at 772. Relying on United States v. Inadi, 475 U.S. 387, 394, 106 S.Ct. 1121, 1125-26, 89 L.Ed.2d 390 (1986), we found that the government was not required to demonstrate the examining pathologist's unavailability in order to enter the report. We specifically stated that the reasoning in Inadi which led us to that conclusion would apply equally to other types of hearsay exceptions--including business records. Id. at 774; see White v. Illinois, 502 U.S. 346, 354, 112 S.Ct. 736, 741-42, 116 L.Ed.2d 848 (1992) ([U]navailability analysis is a necessary part of the Confrontation Clause inquiry only when the challenged out-of-court statements were made in the course of a prior judicial proceeding.). Having determined that, our decision in Manocchio noted that it was left ... with reliability as the determining factor for the admissibility of the autopsy report under the Confrontation Clause. Manocchio, 919 F.2d at 776. However, we specifically noted that reliability could be shown by showing that the evidence falls within a firmly rooted hearsay exception. Id.; see White, 502 U.S. at 356, n. 8, 112 S.Ct. at 742-43 n. 8 (noting that  'firmly rooted' exceptions carry sufficient indicia of reliability to satisfy the reliability requirement posed by the Confrontation Clause); United States v. Trenkler, 61 F.3d 45, 64 (1st Cir.1995) (Torruella, C.J., dissenting on other grounds). Since we have already shown that to be true in the present case, we need not address this argument further. 3