Opinion ID: 4557268
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Dual Role Opinion Testimony

Text: We now turn to Rodriguez’s challenges to the dual role opinion testimony offered by two law enforcement witnesses for the government. Rodriguez contends that the district court erred both in instructing the jury on such testimony and in admitting it in the first place. We review a district court’s admission of expert testimony or lay opinion testimony for abuse of discretion. United States v. Gadson, 763 F.3d 1189, 1202, 1209 (9th Cir. 2014). However, we review de novo a district court’s “construction or interpretation of the Federal Rules of Evidence.” United States v. Wells, 879 F.3d 900, 914 (9th Cir. 2018) (citation and ellipsis omitted). We review de novo whether a jury instruction misstates the law, although we review the “language and formulation” of a jury instruction for abuse of discretion. Cortes, 757 F.3d at 857. Plain error review applies where the defendant failed to object at the trial level. Murphy, 824 F.3d at 1204.
Rodriguez contends that the district court did not properly instruct the jury regarding dual role witnesses. She argues that the district court failed to distinguish between lay and expert opinion testimony, lumping all opinion testimony into a single category. She asserts that the court’s instructions not only failed to clarify the witnesses’ various roles for the jury, and the significance of each, but also the admission of hearsay statements through Rule 106). We thus caution district courts in the use of jury instructions along the lines of the midtrial instruction used in this case. UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ 23 erroneously “elevated all their opinions to the status of expert opinions.” Rodriguez did not object below to the district court’s dual role instructions, so plain error review applies. 10 The court’s instructions explained that two government witnesses, Officers Gonzalo Gallardo and John Feeney, had been permitted to “testif[y] in a type of dual role: They testified about facts they saw, heard, or learned as a percipient witness but also were allowed to express opinions based on their education, training, and experience.” The court urged the jury to “pay careful attention as to whether a witness testified to his personal knowledge as a percipient witness or testified to an opinion” and explained the caveats attendant to each role. The court explained that, when witnesses provided opinion testimony, they might rely on facts outside their personal knowledge—but such testimony could not serve as proof of the underlying facts. The court also admonished the jury that “[t]he fact that these witnesses were allowed to express those opinions should not cause you to give those witnesses undue deference to any aspect of their testimony or otherwise influence your assessment of the credibility of such witnesses.” The dual role instructions—including the distinction between fact testimony, on the one hand, and opinion testimony, on the other—closely tracked the corresponding Ninth Circuit model instruction. See Ninth Circuit Manual of Model 10 The only objection voiced by defense counsel was to eliminate any use of the term “expert” in the court’s provisional instruction and replace it with the broader label of “opinion witnesses”—which the court did. Thus, it is defense counsel’s own phrasing of which Rodriguez now complains. 24 UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ Criminal Jury Instructions, No. 4.15, Dual Role Testimony (2019). We conclude that the jury instructions were not plainly erroneous. The district court addressed the two main areas of concern we have identified with respect to dual role witnesses: (i) that the facts on which an expert opinion is premised “should not be considered for their truth but only to assess the strength of his opinions”; and (ii) that the jury should not give undue deference to the testimony of an opinion witness, just because he has been permitted to testify in that capacity. United States v. Vera, 770 F.3d 1232, 1246 (9th Cir. 2014). The court’s decision not to label Gallardo or Feeney as an “expert” in front of the jury further mitigated the risk that the jury would attach too much weight to the officers’ lay testimony based on their dual witness status. Although we find no plain error in the district court’s instructions, we emphasize that trial courts should endeavor to explain clearly the differences between lay percipient testimony, lay opinion testimony (as governed by Rule 701), and expert opinion testimony (as governed by Rule 702) in settings where all three arise. In many cases, designating an umbrella category of “opinion testimony” may fail to provide an appropriate level of nuance to guide the jury’s evaluation of dual role testimony. B. Admission of Opinion Testimony of Officers Gallardo and Feeney Rodriguez also argues that the district court erred in admitting the testimony of Officers Gallardo and Feeney, to the extent they testified about the meaning of the intercepted UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ 25 phone calls played at trial. 11 Rodriguez contends that the court erroneously admitted the officers’ opinions as expert testimony, although they testified to terms without fixed meanings and without a reliable methodology of interpretation. Rodriguez further contends that the testimony would not be admissible as lay opinion testimony either—and that its admission “infected the entire trial” and prejudiced her defense. We agree with Rodriguez that the district court erred in admitting some of the opinions of Gallardo and Feeney as expert testimony. The district court appeared to misapprehend the parameters of expert testimony in the gang expert context, assuming that the officers’ general qualifications sufficed to support the full range of opinion testimony they might give. But as we have explained, to provide interpretive testimony concerning terms or phrases without fixed meanings, “an officer’s qualifications, including his experience with [gang] investigations and intercepted communications, are relevant but not alone sufficient to satisfy Federal Rule of Evidence 702.” Vera, 770 F.3d at 1241. “Rather, Rule 702 requires district courts to assure that an expert’s methods for interpreting the new terminology are both reliable and adequately explained.” Id. Of course, some of the testimony offered by Gallardo and Feeney indeed passes muster under Rule 702. The officers’ appropriate expert testimony included their opinions about the structure and operation of the OCMM, as well as their opinions concerning the meanings of terms with fixed meanings like “taxes,” “green lights,” or “hard candy 11 Rodriguez does not challenge “the portions of the witnesses’ testimony relating to the Mexican Mafia’s organization, structure, methods of operations, roles, and members.” 26 UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ lists.” See id. (“Officers may testify about their interpretations of ‘commonly used . . . jargon’ based solely on their training and experience.” (citation omitted)); United States v. Hankey, 203 F.3d 1160, 1167–70 (9th Cir. 2000) (permitting police gang expert testimony where the officer had acquired relevant expertise through “street intelligence”). But when the officers began to opine about uncommon terms or phrases that they encountered for the first time in this investigation, the basis for their expert testimony in numerous instances grew thin. And when this occurred, the officers generally did not offer an explanation for how they arrived at their interpretations, nor did the court require them to provide one. At times when the officers did provide an explanation, some of those explanations failed to evince indicia of reliability or methodological rigor. The district court uniformly treated all the officers’ interpretive testimony as expert opinion, irrespective of the specific foundation for any individual interpretive statement. In so doing, the court misapplied the Rules of Evidence to the testimony before it. As the government argues, some of the proffered expert testimony was appropriate for admission as lay opinion testimony based on the officers’ firsthand experience with the investigation. But because the district court did not view any of the officers’ interpretive testimony as lay opinion testimony, it did not require the officers to establish the requisite foundation for each such opinion. See Vera, 770 F.3d at 1243 (“[L]aw enforcement officers may offer lay and expert opinions about the meaning of intercepted phone calls, but the foundation laid for those opinions must satisfy Rules 701 and 702, respectively.”). Therefore, while Gallardo and Feeney established the requisite personal UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ 27 knowledge to support some of their lay opinions, they failed to do so in numerous instances, and those portions of their testimony were erroneously admitted. We note that the district court’s struggle to be a “vigilant gatekeep[er]” of the line between the two roles, United States v. Freeman, 498 F.3d 893, 904 (9th Cir. 2007), was compounded by its failure to bifurcate or otherwise clearly mark the distinctions in the officers’ testimony as lay and expert witnesses. District courts should be cognizant of the “dangers” and confusion associated with allowing officers to give both lay and expert opinion testimony. United States v. Torralba-Mendia, 784 F.3d 652, 658 (9th Cir. 2015); Vera, 770 F.3d at 1242; United States v. Anchrum, 590 F.3d 795, 803 (9th Cir. 2009); Freeman, 498 F.3d at 903–04. To ameliorate this concern, we encourage district courts to “clearly separate the case agent’s testimony between lay observations and expert testimony.” Torralba-Mendia, 784 F.3d at 658; see also United States v. Martinez, 657 F.3d 811, 817 (9th Cir. 2011) (“The government was nearly always exact in specifying when it was asking for [the agent’s] testimony as an expert.”); Anchrum, 590 F.3d at 803–04 (explaining with approval how the district court “clearly separated” the case agent’s testimony into different phases for lay and expert opinion to avoid the risks identified in Freeman). Careful separation of this testimony “avoid[s] blurring the distinction between [an agent’s] distinct role as a lay witness and his role as an expert witness,” as happened in this trial. Anchrum, 590 F.3d at 804; Freeman, 498 F.3d at 904. And clear demarcation of when officers are testifying in their lay or expert roles makes it easier to determine whether and how that testimony is supported by the proper foundation. 28 UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ We next ask whether the erroneously admitted testimony was harmless. Wells, 879 F.3d at 923. Although we “begin with a presumption of prejudice[,] ‘[t]hat presumption can be rebutted by a showing that it is more probable than not that the jury would have reached the same verdict even if the evidence had [not] been admitted.’” Jules Jordan Video, Inc. v. 144942 Can. Inc., 617 F.3d 1146, 1159 (9th Cir. 2010) (quoting Obrey v. Johnson, 400 F.3d 691, 701 (9th Cir. 2005)). Upon consideration of the totality of the record, we find that the erroneously admitted testimony was harmless. The majority of the officers’ testimony did pass muster under the Rules of Evidence. And three cooperating witnesses separately implicated Rodriguez in the conspiracies for which she was convicted—including particularly extensive testimony by cooperator Glenn Navarro. The phone calls themselves were admitted into evidence as well, amenable to interpretation through a combination of the admissible portions of Gallardo’s and Feeney’s testimony and the context provided by the percipient witnesses at trial. Cf. Torralba-Mendia, 784 F.3d at 662 (finding that the district court’s error in failing to instruct the jury on how to evaluate gang expert’s dual role testimony did not require reversal in part because evidence on which the expert based his testimony was provided to the jury, such that “the jury had the information it needed to evaluate [the expert’s] opinions”). And the government’s case was bolstered by the documentary evidence admitted at trial, including a series of prison correspondences and Mexican Mafia ledgers that further implicated Rodriguez. In the context of the full trial, the inadmissible evidence played a small role. We thus conclude that it is more probable than not that, without the erroneously admitted testimony, the jury would have reached the same verdict. UNITED STATES V. RODRIGUEZ 29