Opinion ID: 349660
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Exclusion of Psycholinguist Testimony

Text: 75 As part of its effort to rebut appellant's defense that her co-participants compelled her to engage in the bank robbery, the government introduced certain pre-arrest tape recordings carrying appellant's voice and certain pre-arrest manuscripts which she wrote. The essence of the message in those communiques was that she acted voluntarily in robbing the bank. During her trial testimony, appellate asserted that she had not authored the communiques spoken or written by her, that they were authored by certain of her captors, and that she spoke or wrote them under coercion and not voluntarily. 76 Appellant then attempted to have a psycholinguist, Dr. Margaret Singer, testify that appellant did not author the communiques. The district court, after characterizing Singer as an eminently qualified clinical psychologist and a recognized expert in psycholinguistics, United States v. Hearst, 412 F.Supp. 893, 894 (N.D.Cal.1976), refused to permit her to testify. The judge articulated three grounds upon which he exercised his discretion. First, the court indicated that the use of psycholinguistics for authorship attribution had not yet achieved such general acceptance among psychological and scientific authorities as to justify courts of law in admitting expert testimony on this subject. Id. at 895. Second, the relevancy of evidence on the issue of authorship was minimal. In the district court's words: 77 The issue with respect to these writings or tape recordings is the defendant's state of mind at the time she wrote or uttered the words used. Whether or not the defendant herself authored or composed the sentences chosen to express the ideas conveyed in the writings is immaterial to the issue of whether she subscribed to these ideas that is, whether she meant what she said. 78 Id. (emphasis in original). Third, the significance of (Singer's proposed) testimony did not warrant the inordinate consumption of time that would have been necessitated by that testimony and any rebuttal testimony. Id. 79 Without passing on the district court's first ground for its ruling, and assuming the evidence was relevant, we pass to the third stated ground for refusing the testimony. As noted in part IV, supra, the district court has broad discretion to exclude even relevant evidence if its probative value is substantially outweighed . . . by considerations of undue delay, waste of time, or needless presentation of cumulative evidence. Fed.R.Evid. 403. Here a variety of considerations support the district court's ruling. First, that appellant did not author the communiques was not a contested fact. Both appellant and Lifton testified that she was not the author, and the testimony of Dr. Kozol, one of the government's expert witnesses, supported rather than contradicted this contention. 15 Second, although evidence of nonauthorship may have been relevant to the ultimate issue of voluntary endorsement, the probative value of such evidence was relatively light. 16 In the balancing process required by Rule 403, the considerations of delay and needless cumulation appear substantially more weighty than the probative value of nonauthorship, an undisputed fact. Third, appellant had no independent right to introduce Singer's testimony to corroborate her own story regarding nonauthorship. As already noted, the government never contested her asserted nonauthorship. Singer's corroborative testimony, therefore, was not allowable as such. We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding the testimony of Singer.