Opinion ID: 799035
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Marcello's Voice Identification Expert

Text: Finally, I do not believe the district court's decision to exclude expert testimony on the reliability of voice identification evidence was correct, although I agree with my colleagues that it does not require reversal. Marcello was accused of murdering Michael Spilotro. Spilotro's daughter, Michelle, testified that on the day of her father's murder, a man called their home and asked to speak to him. She testified that the same person had regularly called her father. Three years after Spilotro's death, Michelle listened to a voice lineup put together by the FBI. The first five voices on the tape were those of officers reading a sample piece of text; the last was Marcello's. Michelle picked Marcello's voice as the one she remembered hearing on the day of her father's death. At trial, she told the jury that she was 100 percent sure it was Marcello's voice she had heard on the phone. Marcello sought to have an expert, Dr. Daniel Yarmey, testify about the reliability of voice identification. Dr. Yarmey is a professor of psychology who has conducted extensive research in the areas of memory; he has investigated voice identification in particular. His testimony would have done much more than tell jurors voice identifications frequently are mistaken. Ante at 529. He was prepared to educate the jury about error rates associated with voice identificationin some studies, misidentification rates were as high as 45% and the factors that affect the reliability of voice lineups. Dr. Yarmey had also conducted his own evaluation of the lineup that Michelle Spilotro had heard. He recruited 157 undergraduates at his university to listen to the lineup, evaluate it using a number of factors, and try to identify the suspect's voice. The listeners were able to do so at a rate that exceeded pure chance. The district court refused to admit this expert testimony, not because of any deficiencies in Dr. Yarmey's qualifications, but because the district court believed that this information was something the jury knows anyway. The court also assessed the voice lineup on its own and concluded that there was nothing about the difference [between Marcello's voice and the others] that would suggest to a hearer, to a listener, that one or the other was actually the suspect. Even though our review of a district court's decision not to admit expert testimony is deferential, see United States v. Carter, 410 F.3d 942, 950 (7th Cir.2005), in my view the district court's refusal to admit Dr. Yarmey's testimony was a mistake. In recent years, courts have become more aware of the reality that human memory is not necessarily reliable. A study of 200 wrongful convictions revealed that 79% rested in part on mistaken eyewitness identifications. Brandon L. Garrett, Judging Innocence, 108 COLUM. L.REV. 55, 60 (2008). This does not mean that courts must impose a blanket ban on such testimony, but it is critical to be cautious. We cannot ignore the power that a witness's claim to be 100% sure may have on a jury, nor can we ignore that such witnesses are sometimes, unfortunately, mistaken. The Supreme Court recently emphasized that one tool that courts can use to ensure juries do not give such testimony more weight than it is worth is to allow expert testimony on the hazards of eyewitness identification. Perry v. New Hampshire, ___ U.S. ___, 132 S.Ct. 716, 729, 181 L.Ed.2d 694 (2012). As Dr. Yarmey's research shows, a witness's voice memory is not exempt from the sort of problems that we more commonly associate with a witness's vision; just as with eyewitness identification, expert testimony on the reliability of voice identification reveals vulnerabilities that lie outside the range of common knowledge. The district court's decision not to admit Dr. Yarmey's testimony evinces a misunderstanding of the purpose of expert testimony on the reliability of a witness's memory. As we explained in United States v. Bartlett , expert testimony should not be kept out simply because a court believes jurors know from their daily lives that memory is fallible. 567 F.3d 901, 906 (7th Cir.2009). That may be true, but [t]he question that social science can address is how fallible, id., and thus how deeply the jury might wish to discount any given identification. That jurors have beliefs about this does not make expert evidence irrelevant; to the contrary, it may make such evidence vital, for if jurors' beliefs are mistaken then they may reach incorrect conclusions. Expert evidence can help jurors evaluate whether their beliefs about the reliability of eyewitness testimony are correct.  Id. As is clear from the district court's remarks in this case, the court itself held beliefs about the reliability and suggestiveness of the voice lineup that are belied by the expert's conclusions. As far as we know, the jurors shared these misconceptions. This case thus highlights why it is critical for jurors to hear expert testimony in order to be able correctly to evaluate a witness's memory. Just because courts have routinely admitted laywitness identification in the past is no reason to continue to do so without skepticism, in light of modern research showing the fallibility of such identifications. When a court does admit such identification testimony, expert testimony will often be necessary to enable jurors to properly evaluate its reliability. I do not believe, however, that this error warrants reversal of Marcello's conviction. Even if Michelle Spilotro had not testified, there was ample additional evidencenotably Nick Calabrese's testimonythat implicated Marcello in Spilotro's murder. The error was therefore harmless.