Opinion ID: 1195793
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Alicea's Reliance on Testimonial Statements and Crawford

Text: For similar reasons, some of Alicea's testimony also violated Crawford. In Crawford, 541 U.S. 36, 124 S.Ct. 1354, 158 L.Ed.2d 177, the Supreme Court held that the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment prohibits the introduction into evidence of the out-of-court testimonial statements made by an absent witness unless that witness is unavailable and the defendant had a prior opportunity for cross-examination. Id. at 54, 124 S.Ct. 1354. While the Court did not provide a comprehensive definition for the term testimonial, it placed custodial interrogations within the core class covered by the rule it had just announced. Id. at 51, 124 S.Ct. 1354; see also Davis v. Washington, 547 U.S. 813, 822, 126 S.Ct. 2266, 2273, 165 L.Ed.2d 224 (2006) (explaining that a custodial police interrogation after a Miranda warning `qualifies under any conceivable definition' of an `interrogation' (quoting Crawford, 541 U.S. at 53, 124 S.Ct. 1354)). When faced with the intersection of the Crawford rule and officer experts, [4] we have determined that an officer expert's testimony violates Crawford if [the expert] communicated out-of-court testimonial statements of cooperating witnesses and confidential informants directly to the jury in the guise of an expert opinion. Lombardozzi, 491 F.3d at 72. As with a Rule 703 challenge to the expert's reliance on hearsay, the question under Crawford is whether the expert applied his expertise to those statements but did not directly convey the substance of the statements to the jury, id. at 73. In fact, when the inadmissible hearsay at issue is a testimonial statement, the Supreme Court has recognized that Rule 703 hearsay claims and Sixth Amendment Crawford claims are are generally designed to protect similar values. Dukagjini, 326 F.3d at 56 n. 6 (citing Idaho v. Wright, 497 U.S. 805, 814, 110 S.Ct. 3139, 111 L.Ed.2d 638 (1990)) (remarking that [i]n this case, the appellants' hearsay and Confrontation Clause claims are coextensive, but noting that the Supreme Court has been careful not to equate the two types of claims). Because it is a question of law whether an expert witness's testimony violated Crawford, our review is de novo. United States v. Wallace, 447 F.3d 184, 186 (2d Cir.2006). Alicea's reliance on hearsay is beyond doubt; a more difficult question is the extent to which that hearsay took the form of custodial statements and was thus testimonial. At trial, he testified that he had participated in between fifteen and fifty custodial interrogations of Long Island MS-13 members. He also testified that he had learned through a custodial interrogation that MS-13 taxed non-member drug dealers. The interrogation was one that he conducted as part of the same investigation that resulted in the convictions being appealed here. Among the other facts that he learned at least partially from custodial interrogations were that MS-13 treasury funds were used to purchase narcotics and that MS-13 members used interstate telephone calls to coordinate activities. We are at a loss in understanding how Alicea might have applied his expertise to these statements before conveying them to the jury, such that he could have avoided convey[ing] the substance of [those] statements to the jury. Lombardozzi, 491 F.3d at 73. Although the exact source of much of his information remains unclear, there was at least one fact to which Alicea testifiedthe drug taxthat was based directly on statements made by an MS-13 member in custody ( during the course of this very investigation ). This impugns the legitimacy of all of his testimony and strongly suggests to us that Alicea was simply summarizing an investigation by others that [was] not part of the record, Dukagjini, 326 F.3d at 54, and presenting it in the guise of an expert opinion, Lombardozzi, 491 F.3d at 72. We hold, therefore, that Alicea's reliance on and repetition of out-of-court testimonial statements made by individuals during the course of custodial interrogations violated Appellants's rights under the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment.