Opinion ID: 203507
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: The Court's Exclusion of Giambro's Proffered Expert Testimony

Text: Giambro next argues the court erred in excluding testimony from Eric Larson, Giambro's proffered expert. Larson would have testified to inaccuracies and incompleteness in the NFRTR, in order for defendant to argue the government had not met its burden of showing that the Game Getter was unregistered. We review the district court's decision to admit or exclude purported expert testimony for abuse of discretion. Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137, 152, 119 S.Ct. 1167, 143 L.Ed.2d 238 (1999); Newbert, 504 F.3d at 184; Sebaggala, 256 F.3d at 66. The district court relied on two independent grounds to exclude the evidence. It held that Larson did not qualify as an expert under Rules 702 and 703, Fed. R.Evid., and also held that the testimony could be excluded under Rule 403, Fed. R.Evid., because it would mislead the jury and cause confusion. The court did not abuse its discretion as to either ground. The court fully considered Giambro's proffer and held a hearing on the motion in which Larson testified at length. Larson described the nature of the NFRTR and discussed his analysis of the database's reliability. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Larson had obtained reports from the ATF that provided yearly transaction data on registrations. In particular, Larson focused on filings of Form 4, the form by which owners register transfers with the agency. He analyzed data from 1992 to 1996 and concluded that Form 4's were being added back into the NFRTR. [3] Larson testified that one explanation for this finding could be that ATF was doing so in response to errors and omissions in the NFRTR. In support of his conclusion, Larson cited the experience of two gun owners, one who had been involved in a state civil suit against the ATF in 1992, and one who had communicated with the ATF in 1999 after the agency misplaced his ownership records. Larson also relied on his own conversations with ATF personnel, who told him they assumed the agency added records if mistakes were discovered, and a 1998 audit of the NFRTR that concluded agency personnel did not adhere to procedures for processing registration documents in every case. The district court concluded that the testimony was not based upon sufficient facts or data and was not the product of reliable principles and methods, and that Larson had not applied the principles and methods reliably to the facts of the case. See Fed.R.Evid. 702. The court stated that suppositions . . . and conjecture abound[ed] in the testimony, and that Larsen had relied on underlying data [that was] purely anecdotal and without scientific basis. The court further found that certain aspects of Larson's work undercut the reliability of his testimony. See generally Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 589-95, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993); Kumho Tire, 526 U.S. at 147, 119 S.Ct. 1167. The court found that the techniques Larson usedhis statistical analysis of the ATF's annual data, and his correspondence with gun owners and ATF personnelwere untested and lacked peer-review. Larson had also failed to provide the known or potential rate of error for his statistical analysis. The court found that the conclusion he drew represented an unfounded extrapolation from the underlying data. Finally, the court found Larson was unable to establish why the conclusion he reached demonstrated that previous registrations had been destroyed or that, if previous registrations had been misplaced, ATF personnel could not find them through a records search. Giambro asserts the district court erred because [i]ndisputably, applied statistics represents an objective and scientifically-precise (and measurable) science and indisputably, Mr. Larson identified measurable. . . incompleteness/inaccuracies with the NFRTR. The district court was well within its discretion to conclude that, regardless of whether applied statistics as a field is a science, Larson's particular use of the technique to reach his conclusion did not present sufficient indicia of reliability and that the data on which Larson based his analysis was purely anecdotal.