Opinion ID: 2974260
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Admission of Spreadsheets

Text: Younis next contends the district court abused its discretion by admitting several spreadsheets as summary evidence. “The admission of summary charts is a matter within the discretion of the district court, whose decisions in such matters will be upheld absent an abuse of discretion.” United States v. Bray, 139 F.3d 1104, 1109 (6th Cir. 1998) (quotation omitted). Fed. R. Evid. 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 [a] reasonable time and place. The court may order that they be produced in court. This court has identified five preconditions to the admission of summary charts under the rule: - 14 - Nos. 05-1348, 05-1630, 05-1631 United States v. Younes [1] The documents . . . must be so voluminous that they cannot conveniently be examined in court by the trier of fact. That is, the documents must be sufficiently numerous as to make comprehension difficult and inconvenient . . . . [2] [T]he proponent of the summary must also have made the documents available for examination or copying, or both, by other parties at [a] reasonable time and place . . . . [3] [T]he proponent of the summary [must] establish that the underlying documents are admissible in evidence. Thus, if the underlying documents are hearsay and not admissible under any exception, a chart or other summary based on those documents is likewise inadmissible . . . . [4] [A] summary document must be accurate and nonprejudicial. This means first that the information on the document summarizes the information contained in the underlying documents accurately, correctly, and in a nonmisleading manner. Nothing should be lost in the translation. [5] [A] summary document must be properly introduced before it may be admitted into evidence. Bray, 139 F.3d at 1109-10 (quotation marks omitted). Younis contends that the admission of the spreadsheets violated the fourth condition by being argumentative, misleading, and unreliable. Younis also objects that the spreadsheets contain hearsay, but he does not develop the argument. Younis contends that the spreadsheets were impermissibly argumentative because they contained the government’s conclusions about the falsity of particular documents and because they did not attempt to summarize the underlying documents as a whole. Younis fails, however, to identify anything in particular in the spreadsheets that is argumentative. Previous versions of the - 15 - Nos. 05-1348, 05-1630, 05-1631 United States v. Younes spreadsheets featured column headings such as “Start Date Falsified” and labeled several entries as “FRAUD,” which the district judge ordered redacted. Yet, the revised versions, the only relevant ones here, contained no such conclusions. Consider Government Exhibit 562D, which listed students whose records indicated that they enrolled in “travel,” “travel/night,” or “travel/computer” courses with Sahar Younes, who (as noted) taught only English courses. Younis would characterize such information as conclusive of fraud and thus argumentative. But the entries were not conclusive because the information summarized also appeared in the student records provided to the jury (per Bray’s second requirement). The spreadsheets included no new information; they consolidated—but did not modify—information that was already admitted and available to the jury. Regarding the spreadsheets’ capacity to mislead the jury, Younis’s urges that “[t]he charts’ only significance was as lists setting forth the government’s conclusion that the files listed contained fraud, in the amounts enumerated.” Yet all of the government’s exhibits were intended to support its conclusion that fraud occurred, including the spreadsheets summarizing those exhibits. Younis does not argue that the spreadsheets excluded information that would have undercut the fraud inference, and therefore, his argument that the spreadsheets were misleading must fail. Finally, Younis is wrong to suggest that the spreadsheets were unreliable. Younis notes that “four students listed as ineligible testified they had legitimate high school diplomas or GEDs” and that “a number of students whose files contained falsified attendance sheets . . . in fact had attended class and completed the program.” But these facts do not undermine the only claim made by the - 16 - Nos. 05-1348, 05-1630, 05-1631 United States v. Younes spreadsheets: that the files TTC maintained for those students contained falsified high school diplomas, GEDs, or attendance sheets.