Opinion ID: 1450167
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Officer Coleman's Interpretation Testimony

Text: York also challenges Coleman's testimony. Like Brown, Coleman interpreted the drug jargon and code words in York's and Mitchell's conversations. Unlike Brown, Coleman was formally qualified as an expert and had no experience with York's investigation beyond reviewing the audio recording transcripts. Still, York argues that the district court should have excluded Coleman's testimony for two of the same reasons that he believes Brown's testimony was inadmissible. First, York contends that Coleman's testimony violated the Confrontation Clause. But we know from our previous discussion of this issue that York's argument here must fail. Simply because Coleman interpreted Mitchell's words based on his expertise did not change the government's use for playing the audio tapesto provide context for York's admissions. Using the tapes and Coleman's interpretation of them did not implicate Crawford. Moreover, Coleman was not involved in the investigation and never spoke with Mitchell. Coleman interpreted Mitchell's statements based solely on his expertise; York does not contend otherwise. So Coleman's testimony did not draw on any hearsay from Mitchell and therefore did not infringe York's confrontation rights. Second, York argues that Coleman interpreted words that needed no interpretation, thereby exceeding the proper scope of expert testimony. York challenges all of Coleman's interpretation testimony and specifically targets Coleman's translation of numbers like six and nine as well as his interpretation of the phrase get your money straight (a phrase on which Brown did not comment). We review for an abuse of discretion. Farmer, 543 F.3d at 370. As we have discussed, York's and Mitchell's vague or coded references to drugs and money were ambiguous and not readily understood by lay jurors. So Coleman's interpretations of words like hard, soft, six, and nine assisted the jury in understanding those words. Fed.R.Evid. 702; see Ceballos, 302 F.3d at 688. In addition, Coleman's expertise gave him a reliable basis to opine on the meanings of those words. Coleman did not rely on his personal knowledge of the investigation he didn't have any beyond the transcripts. Instead, Coleman testified that, in his experience, nine ounces of cocaine (equal to a quarter kilogram) was a wholesale quantity and that the price of that quantity was anywhere between five or $6,000 up to maybe 9,000. Coleman's knowledge of common quantities and prices gave him a reliable basis to interpret the otherwise undefined terms six and nine as $6,000 and nine ounces of cocaine. Therefore those interpretations were admissible. This reasoning also extends to Coleman's interpretation of get your money straight. York contends that Coleman's testimony was unhelpful because this phrase had no other reasonable interpretation than the one Coleman gave it: York is telling Mitchell to get his money together for the nine-ounce purchase. We disagree. The phrase might have meant a variety of things, such as get your money from a clean source, or it might have referred to a desire for bills of certain denominations, or York might have been telling Mitchell to physically straighten up the cash he brought with him. In other words, we think the phrase get your money straight was just another form of drug slang and, without Coleman's interpretation, would have remained ambiguous to jurors. The court did not err in admitting that interpretation.