Opinion ID: 517671
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: witness identification of marin's voice on audio cassette tapes.

Text: 42 In this case, the government made tape recordings of incriminating telephone conversations between certain individuals involved in this incident. There was identification by four people that one of the individuals speaking on the tapes was defendant Marin. Marin claims these identifications were inadequate and therefore inadmissible because the witnesses did not have a sufficient opportunity to become acquainted with his voice prior to identification. 43 Any person may identify a speaker's voice if he has heard the voice at any time. United States v. Cerone, 830 F.2d 938, 949 (8th Cir.1987). Minimal familiarity is sufficient for admissibility purposes. Id. The four witnesses who identified Marin's voice were Detective Eldon Fontana, Sergeant John Boulger, Karen Bordonaro, and Thomas Marin Palis. 44 Detective Fontana spoke to Marin twice after his arrest, once very briefly and once for five minutes, and heard Marin's voice each time. Sergeant John Boulger arrested Marin in Miami while Marin was speaking on the telephone to the informant in Minneapolis. Sergeant Boulger then interviewed Marin for one-half hour. Boulger, who sat through the entire trial and heard all of the tapes, identified the voice of Rubio on the tapes as that of Marin. 45 After her arrest, Karen Bordonaro, a co-defendant, placed two calls to Colombia relating to drug transactions. She identified the recipient's voice as that of Marin. She was familiar with Marin's voice because she had met with him during numerous drug deals in the year before their arrests. Thomas Mario Palis, the government's informant, placed most of the calls to Marin in Colombia and in Florida. The informant was familiar with Marin's voice, having conducted cocaine deals with him during 1985 and 1986 in the New York area. 46 Attacks on the accuracy of the identification go to the weight of the evidence, and the issue is for the jury to decide. Cerone, 830 F.2d at 949. Accordingly, we find no error in the district court's admission into evidence of the identification of Marin's voice.