Opinion ID: 4535302
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The DHS officers’ testimony

Text: Nor are we persuaded that Officers Darji and Alicea gave false testimony or that the Government’s refusal to label it as such violated its obligations under Napue v. Illinois, 360 U.S. 264 (1959). We start with the most frequently quoted portion of the testimony: Officer Darji’s acknowledgment that the forms in Reyes-Romero’s A-file did not “make any sense.” App. 331. It is not the case that Officer Darji “admitted on the stand that his testimony (given just moments before) was, in fact, nonsense.” App. 32 (emphasis added). Officer Darji had no specific memory of Reyes-Romero’s proceeding, and thus offered testimony only about the “normal practice” in his DHS unit, App. 319. In the leadup to Officer Darji’s oft-quoted admission, the District Court took over questioning and presented him with the irregularities in Reyes-Romero’s forms, asking whether it was “reading those forms correctly.” App. 331. The Court then asked whether “that”—the antecedent of which was the content of “those forms”—“ma[de] any sense,” and Darji admitted it did not. Id. In context, Officer Darji’s comment was a candid admission that he could not explain away the apparent problems with Reyes-Romero’s removal proceeding. And, at least initially, the District Court agreed, summarizing that Officer Darji had admitted that “the process that was used here” did not “ma[ke] . . . sense.” App. 476. The quite different notion that Darji admitted that he had lied in his testimony, however, “is a kind of [factual] Lohengrin,” in that we do not “know whence it came,” IIT v. Vencap, Ltd., 519 F.2d 1001, 1015 (2d Cir. 43 1975). Because that notion finds no support in the record, we reject it. As a result, nothing in Officer Darji’s concession triggered Napue obligations on the part of AUSA Hallowell. Those obligations spring to life only when the prosecutor “knows that his witness is giving testimony that is substantially misleading” and where the misleading nature of the testimony is “obvious.” United States v. Harris, 498 F.2d 1164, 1169 (3d Cir. 1974). A candid admission of the kind Officer Darji gave does not fit those criteria. Nor do the remaining portions of the DHS officers’ testimony. To be sure, both officers, testifying years later and with no specific memory of Reyes-Romero’s removal proceeding, gave testimony that was at times equivocal, confusing, or inconsistent. Officer Darji, for instance, changed an answer he gave about whether a prior signature was required to authorize service of the I-851 on noncitizens. For his part, Officer Alicea gave difficult-to-reconcile answers in response to questions about when in the process the I-851’s contents would be read to the noncitizen in Spanish. But to the extent the officers’ testimony was somewhat “convoluted,” App. 43 (citation omitted), it reflects at least in part the byzantine nature of the administrative removal system and in part the circumstances of their questioning. Given that the District Court assumed the questioning and raised a line of inquiry about the time stamps on the I-851 that Reyes-Romero had not flagged and for which the Government and its witnesses likely had not prepared, it is unsurprising the officers were in some respects ill equipped to explain the contents of Reyes-Romero’s A-file. In short, while we recognize certain weaknesses in the officers’ testimony, we 44 discern no basis in the record to conclude that the officers were deliberately perjuring themselves. At most, they exhibited the kind of inconsistency that is the normal stuff of cross-examination and that might lead a trier of fact to discount their testimony—but not to assume the sort of deliberate dishonesty that would require a prosecutor to correct the record. In our judgment, that distinction is critical here not only because of the effect on AUSA Hallowell’s obligations but also because of the severe reputational, professional, and legal consequences that could flow from a finding that Officers Darji and Alicea deliberately lied under oath. That finding was unjustified here. At bottom, the Napue argument comes to this: that because the District Court ultimately decided not to credit the officers’ testimony, the Government must have been obligated to disclaim it mid-trial. That does not follow. In presenting the testimony of government witnesses, a prosecutor need not “play the role of defense counsel . . . and ferret out ambiguities in his witness’ responses on cross-examination.” Harris, 498 F.2d at 1169. He also cannot supplant the role of the finder of fact in assigning weight to testimony as he deems appropriate. We therefore discern no violation of AUSA Hallowell’s Napue obligations and no basis here to infer bad faith.