Opinion ID: 2434794
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The other evidentiary rulings

Text: López-Capó also argues that he was unfairly prejudiced when the district court: (1) allowed the government to question him about his relationship with his cousin, a known drug dealer, when López-Capó took the stand; and (2) admitted evidence of a riot at Carioca at which López-Capó was not present. Again, we review evidentiary rulings for abuse of discretion. See, e.g., Vega Molina, 407 F.3d at 522. Federal Rule of Evidence 403 allows a district court to exclude relevant evidence when its probative value is substantially outweighed by its prejudicial effect. Because Rule 403 judgments are typically battlefield determinations, and great deference is owed to the trial court's superior coign of vantage, only rarelyand in extraordinarily compelling circumstanceswill we, from the vista of a cold appellate record, reverse a district court's on-the-spot judgment concerning the relative weighing of probative value and unfair effect. United States v. Bunchan, 580 F.3d 66, 71 (1st Cir.2009) (internal citation and quotation marks omitted). This is not such an instance. The district court allowed the government to ask López-Capó two questions regarding his familial relationship with Alexander Capo Trujillo during its cross-examination of López-Capó. First, the government asked whether López-Capó knew Trujillo; López-Capó responded that he did. Second, the government asked what López-Capó's relationship with Trujillo was; López-Capó responded that Trujillo was his cousin. On appeal, López-Capó argues that these questions were irrelevant and unfairly prejudicial because Trujillo was a drug kingpin and a well known federal fugitive whose names [sic] was in the Puerto Rico press with great frequency. Thus, López-Capó argues, the questions made more credible the possibility that [López-Capó] was a member of a drug conspiracy. The district court found the evidence admissible after the government explained that it had reason to believe that López-Capó had inherited all the contacts of Alex Trujillo once Alex Trujillo got arrested by the Federal government. The record establishes that the court considered both the relevance and the prejudicial effect of the evidence, and we find no abuse of discretion in the court's decision to admit it. Furthermore, while this is not the kind of extraordinarily compelling circumstance in which we might reverse a district court's Rule 403 judgment, even if it were, any error would likely be harmless, given the ample evidence against López-Capó. See United States v. Piper, 298 F.3d 47, 56 (1st Cir.2002) (an error is harmless if it is highly probable that the error did not influence the verdict). Nor did the district court abuse its discretion by allowing Police Officer Pedro Flores-Sánchez to testify about a riot that occurred at Carioca in September 2006. The government argued that the riot evidence was relevant to show the dangerousness of Carioca, in support of Count Six of the indictment (conspiring to use firearms to carry out drug crimes), and we agree. Flores-Sánchez did not testify that López-Capó was present at the riot, or that he was in any way associated with the riot. We thus fail to see how López-Capó could have been prejudiced by the testimony. See Fed.R.Evid. 403.