Opinion ID: 203058
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The First Motion in Limine

Text: Brown argues that evidence of Coffey's and L'Esperance's identification of his voice should not have been placed before the jury because the identification was unreliable. We consider the totality of the circumstances to determine whether voice-identification testimony is sufficiently reliable to be allowed into evidence. United States v. Panico, 435 F.3d 47, 49 (1st Cir.2006); see also Fed.R.Evid. 901. Due process requires the exclusion of such testimony only where there is a very substantial likelihood of irreparable misidentification. Panico, 435 F.3d at 49 (quoting United States v. Henderson, 320 F.3d 92, 100 (1st Cir.2003)). The district court did not state the reasons for denying Brown's motion in limine, although it remarked on the reliability of Coffey's and L'Esperance's voice-identification evidence in its earlier decision on Brown's motion to suppress: While defendant objects to the fact that neither Cpl. L'Esperance or Lt. Coffey are trained in voice identification, their prior familiarity with Brown's voice, gleaned from hours of listening to his telephone conversations and debriefing him in person is more than sufficient to establish the reliability of their recognition of his voice. Brown, 322 F.Supp.2d at 105 n. 5. We agree with these observations. There is abundant evidence on record that Coffey and L'Esperance had spent a great deal of time listening to Brown's voice. They transcribed hundreds of hours of tapes from wiretaps during the drug investigation involving Brown in the early 1990s, and L'Esperance met Brown in person several times after Brown decided to cooperate with that investigation. L'Esperance also testified that he saw and spoke to Brown in a courthouse parking lot a few months prior to the events at issue here. Given the degree of contact between these two officers and Brown, we accord very little weight to the fact that most of it occurred ten or twelve years prior to Brown's arrest. Indeed, L'Esperance testified that listening to Brown's voice during the phone conversation with DeVlaminck was like listening to a friend, and Brown himself confirmed his apparent acquaintanceship with L'Esperance by uttering in open court, as L'Esperance was being led to the witness stand, David, my boy, how are we doing? Brown argues that the voice identifications were unreliable because Coffey and L'Esperance had not heard him speak for perhaps ten or twelve years, and his voice had changed dramatically in the interim as a result of cancer surgeries on his tongue. As support, Brown submitted to the district court the affidavit of an otolaryngologist stating: [I]t is likely that Dennis Brown's speech differs today. . . . Specifically his articulation of words would be comparatively diminished. We are unconvinced that Brown's tongue surgeries altered his voice to the dramatic extent he claims. [10] In any event, even if Brown's voice had changed so substantially as to render it unrecognizable, L'Esperance's identification of Brown would probably still be reliable, as the two men had met and spoken in January 2002, after the surgeries. Finally, there is more to voice identification than the degree of articulation of words. L'Esperance stated that he recognized Brown during the phone conversation with DeVlaminck not only because of the sound of his voice, but also because of the distinct manner in which Brown speaks. Our opinion in Ricci v. Urso, 974 F.2d 5 (1st Cir.1992), cited by Brown as support for his position, is easily distinguishable. There, police officers suspected Ricci of being a gambler who was under investigation, and whose voice they had recorded from wiretapped conversations. One of the officers called Ricci and taped a conversation with him of less than a minute, and compared the tape with an earlier-made recording of the gambler's voice. The officer concluded the voices were similar, and that Ricci was therefore the gambler. Ricci, 974 F.2d at 6. We found this voice identification unreliable: the officer made the recording on a hand-held recorder, he had no expert training in voice identification, and the entire conversation with Ricci lasted less than sixty seconds. We concluded that the voice analysis appears no more reliable than the identification of a suspect from a brief visual glimpse. Id. at 7. As in Ricci, nothing in the record indicates that either Coffey or L'Esperance had special training in voice identification, and DeVlaminck's cell phone records from the night in question show that the conversation with Brown was very brief, perhaps under a minute. Nevertheless, in contrast to the officer in Ricci, Coffey and L'Esperance had extensive experience listening to Brown's voice, and L'Esperance had met with Brown personally and recently. Their familiarity with Brown's voice was much more akin to that of the defendant's ex-husband and friend in United States v. Gilbert, 181 F.3d 152 (1st Cir.1999); there, we held identifications made by the ex-husband and friend of the defendant's voice from the audio tape of a phoned-in bomb threat to be sufficiently reliable, despite some suggestive elements in the procedure. See id. at 163. Coffey also testified that he had put the volume of the cell phone on the loudest setting, so that the person on the other end would be audible even without placing one's ear to the receiver; according to Coffey, [W]e could all hear it as clear as day. While we acknowledge that the conditions here  with three men huddled together listening to the same cell phone  were not the best for making a voice identification, the defects were not so grave as to render the district court's ruling on reliability an abuse of discretion. The totality of the circumstances make it quite plausible that Coffey and L'Esperance could hear Brown clearly, and could recognize and remember his voice upon hearing him. Brown also claims that the district court abused its discretion in failing to grant the first motion in limine under Federal Rule of Evidence 403: if Coffey and L'Esperance were to testify as to why they were familiar with Brown's voice, they would have to discuss how Brown was the subject of an extensive investigation by a drug taskforce, and such testimony would leave the jurors with the unfair impression that he was a career criminal. According to Brown, this danger substantially outweighed any probative value the officers' voice-identification testimony may have had. See Fed.R.Evid. 403. In our view, Coffey's and L'Esperance's identifications of Brown's voice in the cell phone conversation had considerable probative value to an issue directly in dispute: whether Brown was the man on the other end of the line, instructing DeVlaminck to sell the guns and return with the money, tends to show that Brown was the owner of the guns, or at least had a significant stake in their sale. On the other side of the equation, any risk of unfair prejudice resulting from testimony on Brown's criminal past was greatly attenuated by the cautious way in which the parties fashioned their arguments and elicited testimony at trial. While both parties' closing arguments referred to the wiretap investigation, neither stated the purpose of the investigation or even that it involved suspected criminal activity. Similarly, Coffey testified that Brown had been the subject of a wiretap investigation, but did not reveal its purpose or any details of it, or that Brown was suspected of committing a crime. L'Esperance likewise testified that Brown had been wiretapped and recorded as part of a law enforcement initiative. Brown stipulated at trial that he had previously been convicted of a crime punishable by a term of imprisonment exceeding one year. The district court informed the jury of this stipulation, and cautioned the jurors not to speculate on the nature of the crime of which Brown had been convicted. While the wiretap testimony may have led some jurors to speculate as to why Brown was investigated in the early 1990s, it is difficult to imagine any significant danger of unfair prejudice accruing to Brown that would outweigh the probative value of the testimony. Any such juror probably simply assumed the investigation related to the crime Brown had stipulated to committing. It is highly unlikely that any juror based all or a substantial portion of his or her decision regarding Brown's guilt on the fact that he had been the subject of a wiretap investigation. See United States v. Flemmi, 402 F.3d 79, 86 n. 8 (1st Cir.2005) (Evidence is unfairly prejudicial if it invites the jury to render a verdict on an improper emotional basis. (quoting United States v. Varoudakis, 233 F.3d 113, 122 (1st Cir.2000)) (internal quotation marks omitted)). In any event, we need not strike the Rule 403 balance ourselves, but need merely determine whether the district court abused its discretion in striking the balance. It is clear that there was no abuse of discretion here. See United States v. Charles, 456 F.3d 249, 257 (1st Cir.2006) (reversal of district court's Rule 403 judgment called for only rarely and in extraordinarily compelling circumstances (quoting Flemmi, 402 F.3d at 86) (internal quotation marks omitted)). We accordingly conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Brown's motion in limine to exclude the voice-identification testimony of Coffey and L'Esperance.