Opinion ID: 42471
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Expert on Eyewitness Identification

Text: Smith contends that the district court erred by excluding the testimony of Dr. Michael Leippe, an expert on the area of memory and perception, without conducting an appropriate inquiry. Dr. Leippe would have commented on 1) the lack of correlation between certainty and accuracy; 2) the weapon-focus effect;5 and 3) the impact of stress on memory.6 We review the district court’s decision to exclude evidence for abuse of discretion. Smith, 122 F.3d at 1357. To determine whether expert testimony is 5 The weapon-focus effect is a theory about the adverse affect on memory of the presence of a weapon. 6 We reject Smith’s claim that the district court erred by declining to hold a hearing or otherwise declining to consider whether the proffered testimony would assist the trier of fact. The district court’s (albeit brief) re-consideration of the eyewitness-identification expert testimony in this trial was not the first instance in which the court had reviewed this testimony. And the district court specifically referenced its more thorough ruling from Smith’s previous trial, where the court addressed the topics on which Dr. Leippe planned to testify and explained how the court reached the conclusion that such testimony would not assist the trier of fact. 9 admissible under Federal Rule of Evidence 702, we must determine two things: 1) whether the testimony is scientific knowledge, and 2) whether the testimony will assist the trier of fact. Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 113 S.Ct. 2786, 2795-96 (1993). In United States v. Thevis, 665 F.2d 616, 641 (5th Cir. Unit B 1982) (superseded by statute on other grounds), we concluded that a district court did not err in excluding proffered expert testimony about eyewitness reliability because we concluded that such testimony does not assist the jury.7 We reaffirmed this conclusion, post-Daubert, in United States v. Smith, 122 F.3d 1335, 1357-59 (11th Cir. 1997), where the defendant sought to present the testimony of an expert about all three of the issues which Smith sought to present here. Therefore, based on Smith, we conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in excluding the expert testimony about these topics.8 7 In Stein v. Reynolds Sec., Inc., 667 F.2d 33, 34 (11th Cir. 1982), we concluded that Unit B panel or en banc court decisions of the former Fifth circuit are binding precedent in this Circuit. 8 We reached this decision in Smith by referencing our reasoning in Thevis: 1) such testimony would permit a witness to comment on the credibility of another witness; 2) the problems of eyewitness identification could be addressed through cross-examination; and 3) a jury could weigh the problems of eyewitness identification through common-sense analysis. See Smith, 122 F.3d at 1357-59. Smith has presented data that might undermine parts of this rationale. He specifically presents evidence tending to demonstrate that the lack of correlation between a witness’s level of certainty and the accuracy of their identification is not within the common sense of the jury. But as in our decision in Smith, we feel limited by the prior-panel-precedent rule: only a decision of this Court en banc or the Supreme Court may overrule Thevis and Smith. See Smith, 122 F.3d at 1359. 10 We suspect that even if the exclusion was an error, the error was harmless. In addition to the testimony of three eyewitnesses, the Government presented the testimony of several other people linking Smith to the robbery.9