Opinion ID: 195901
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Availability of Cross-Examination

Text: 24 Jackman next contends that because he could not fully cross-examine Deborah Jackman, Hurlock and Stetson, their testimony should have been excluded under Fed.R.Evid. 701 and Fed.R.Evid. 403. Specifically, Jackman argues that because the district court had already ruled that evidence of the Connecticut robbery was unduly prejudicial and off-limits, he could not inquire about the effect the witnesses' viewing of the Connecticut robbery photograph had on their subsequent identification of him in the Revere photographs. The court's ruling, however, could not possibly be construed as meaning that the defendant could not elicit testimony related to the Connecticut bank robbery on cross-examination. Defendants are often confronted with witnesses who possess knowledge of the defendant's past criminal history, knowledge that cannot be introduced by the prosecution. Although such knowledge could potentially be a source of bias infecting the witness's testimony, we know of no evidentiary doctrine that would ordinarily exclude such testimony simply because cross-examination by the defendant about that knowledge could be highly damaging to his case. Thus, Jackman's failure to cross-examine these witnesses on this issue was not ordained by the court, but was instead a tactical decision. See Wright, 904 F.2d at 406 (defendant's decision not to cross-examine law enforcement officers for bias was tactical decision); Allen, 787 F.2d at 937 (failure to cross-examine law enforcement officers on bias was a tactical choice by defendants similar to those frequently faced at trial). But see United States v. Calhoun, 544 F.2d 291, 296-97 (6th Cir.1976) (defendant's failure to cross-examine probation officer on possible bias was not waiver of right to cross-examine because the choice given is not real, and amounts to a choice between the rock and the whirpool (internal quotation omitted)). 25 Jackman urges us to adopt the reasoning of the Sixth Circuit in Calhoun, in which the court ruled inadmissible identification testimony by a defendant's probation officer because of the unfairly prejudicial evidence the jury would have heard had the defendant cross-examined the witness on his possible biases. Id. at 296. It is true that we have stated that the admission of lay opinion evidence is favored provided it is well founded on personal knowledge and susceptible to cross-examination. United States v. Paiva, 892 F.2d 148, 157 (1st Cir.1989). Furthermore, the advisory committee's note to Rule 701 makes clear that the rule's justification relies in part on the natural characteristics of the adversary system and the fact that cross-examination and argument will point up the weakness of broadly asserted opinion testimony. Thus, there may be cases in which these safeguards are absent to such an extent that to admit the opinion testimony would constitute an abuse of discretion. To the extent that Calhoun may be read as imposing a ban on identification testimony by non-percipient witnesses who may possess biases that cannot be fully explored on cross-examination without exposing a defendant's prior criminal history, we decline to follow that case. We believe that a better reading of Calhoun limits its application to those cases in which a non-percipient identification witness's only encounters with the defendant involved his criminal past, and thus the defendant's possible avenues of safe cross-examination are so limited that the testimony might not carry the adversarial safeguards assumed by the drafters of Rule 701. 5 This is not such a case. 26 All three of the opinion witnesses had extensive contacts with Jackman prior to, and wholly separate from, their having viewed the Connecticut robbery photograph. Thus, Jackman's possible avenues of safe cross-examination were manifold, and his counsel quite effectively traveled down several of them, exposing Deborah Jackman's potential biases against her ex-spouse, Hurlock's comparatively infrequent contacts with the defendant, and Stetson's reliance on medication for depression and anxiety, which he failed to take the morning he first identified Jackman in the Revere robbery photographs. The single area of cross-examination that Jackman could not explore without the potential of opening up his prior criminal history was the possible bias caused by the witnesses' prior viewing of the Connecticut robbery photograph. This limitation on Jackman's cross-examination was of the defendant's own choosing and was insufficient to make the opinion testimony inadmissible under Rule 701 or Rule 403.