Opinion ID: 2993622
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Admissibility of Evidence from Facebook

Text: After the district court denied Flores’s motion to suppress, Flores moved in limine to exclude any evidence referring to her personal drug use, arguing that references to personal drug use were inadmissible propensity evidence under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b) and unfairly prejudicial under Rule 403. The district court denied her motion and overruled her Rule 403 and 404 objections at trial. We review the denial of Flores’s motion and the rejection of her objections for abuse of discretion. See United States v. Curtin, 489 F.3d 935, 943 (9th Cir. 2007) (en banc). Flores contends that the two Facebook messages the government introduced were improperly used for propensity purposes and were unfairly prejudicial—concerns which were improperly compounded by the admission of evidence that Flores also used marijuana during her pretrial release period. Flores is correct that drug use and simple possession cannot be introduced to show that a defendant conspired to smuggle drugs. See United States v. Vizcarra-Martinez, 66 F.3d 1006, 1015 (9th Cir. 1995) (noting that possession of personal use amounts of a drug does not evidence conspiracy to manufacture that drug); United States v. Mehrmanesh, 689 F.2d 822, 831–32 (9th Cir. 1982) (rejecting the argument that a jury can infer importation from drug use). She is incorrect that the evidence was inadmissible, however, 34 UNITED STATES V. FLORES because the government used the evidence for different, permissible purposes. The evidence supported a reasonable inference that the Facebook messages referred to the very drugs Flores was arrested for transporting. Thus, the messages were at least arguably tantamount to admissions to the crime charged. Accordingly, Rule 404(b) is inapplicable because the evidence did not refer to other bad acts at all; it referred to the bad act at issue. See United States v. Rizk, 660 F.3d 1125, 1131 (9th Cir. 2011). Indeed, it would have been illogical for the government to use the messages for propensity purposes, as that would have bolstered Flores’s claim that the messages referred to other uncharged bad acts, whereas the government’s argument depended in part on convincing the jury that the messages referred to the importation with which Flores was charged. Thus, the district court’s decision to admit the evidence as a potential admission was not an abuse of discretion because the government’s characterization of the messages was supported by “inferences that may be drawn from facts in the record.” Redlightning, 624 F.3d at 1110. That Flores presented a competing plausible characterization of the Facebook messages goes to the weight of the evidence, not its admissibility. Nor did the district court abuse its discretion under Rule 403 because the prejudice created by an admission, while severe, is not unfair. See United States v. Hankey, 203 F.3d 1160, 1172 (9th Cir. 2000). Allowing the government to use the messages for nonpropensity impeachment purposes—i.e., to show that Flores was lying about what she wanted her cousin to delete from Facebook—was not an abuse of discretion. The same is true of the government’s reference to Flores’s pre-trial drug use, which was introduced to show that Flores had lied to a federal UNITED STATES V. FLORES 35 judge and thus was untrustworthy, rather than to show Flores’s propensity to commit drug crimes. Moreover, the court explicitly instructed the jury that it could not consider evidence of Flores’s other wrongful acts “as evidence of guilt of the crime for which the defendant is now on trial.” Because the evidence was used for permissible purposes only, the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Flores’s motion in limine or overruling her objections. See United States v. Castillo, 181 F.3d 1129, 1134 (9th Cir. 1999) (“[U]nless the evidence of other acts only tends to prove propensity, it is admissible.”).