Opinion ID: 203873
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Background and qualification as an expert

Text: After taking the stand, Agent Toro first explained that his division, the Special Investigations Unit, was responsible for investigating organized crime and governmental corruption in Puerto Rico. Agent Toro testified that he had worked for the Unit for eleven years and three months. During that time period, he had been assigned to a federal agency (the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency) for eight and a half years. Agent Toro's primary job responsibility was conducting investigations related to drug trafficking and weapons, which often involved surveillance, interviewing informers, executing search warrants, seizing contraband, and making arrests. He testified that he had, in the past, worked undercover at various drug points, including in public housing projects. Over the course of his career, he had been involved with more than seventy-five undercover transactions (though he did not himself conduct any undercover drug purchases at Covadonga) and had, in the past, been qualified as an expert for two trials involving another public housing project in Puerto Rico. The government tendered Agent Toro as an expert in sales and distribution of illegal narcotics controlled substances. Although this phrase is ambiguous, the prosecutor apparently intended that Toro would testify as an expert on the structure and typical operation of drug distribution conspiracies at Puerto Rico housing projects. During the course of voir dire by defense counsel, Agent Toro testified that he had received formal training after being sworn in as an agent through his participation in the Special Investigations Unit Academy, the Puerto Rico Police Academy, several trainings with the DEA, and five trainings at the Institute of Police and Management in Florida. However, he had received no specific training as to drug quantities or the amount of drugs ... sold in Puerto Rico or the movement and amounts of drugs specifically as to the public housing project known as Nuestra Señora de Covadonga. Instead, he presented himself as an expert based on [his] daily work for the last eleven years and a half. At sidebar, the defense attorneys expressed reservations about Toro's qualifications as an expert. They protested that Toro should not testify as to the specific drug quantities for which each defendant was responsible, stating that he had no factual basis to be able to form an opinion as to how much drugs were being sold at a point in Covadonga, much less the amounts attributable to each defendant. Defense counsel argued that Toro had only learned about the case by interviewing informants and therefore his testimony was based on hearsay rather than personal knowledge. The government, for its part, maintained that Agent Toro's experience made him an expert as to the sale and distribution of controlled substances at drug points in general, and also that in other aspects of his testimony (presumably as a fact witness,) he would be testifying about Covadonga and the drug conspiracy [of] which he ha[d] direct knowledge. The government also repeatedly assured defense counsel and the court that Agent Toro would not attribute specific drug quantities to each defendant, and that he would instead provide expert testimony as to drug distribution methods and so forth, of people involved in this type of operation ... and how the drug point was run, the different roles within the drug point and the quantities sold in Covadonga. The court accepted Agent Toro as an expert over the vigorous objections of all defendants.