Opinion ID: 152950
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Officer Vidal-Gil's Testimony

Text: Diaz argues the district court erred when it denied his motion to preclude Police Officer Eddie Vidal-Gil from testifying as an expert on the price of drugs and the nature of drug organizations. We review this preserved objection for abuse of discretion. United States v. Reynoso, 336 F.3d 46, 49 (1st Cir.2003). As Diaz concedes, government officers may, depending on the facts, be qualified as experts on how drug organizations work and similar data. E.g., United States v. García-Morales, 382 F.3d 12, 18-19 (1st Cir.2004). But he argues the court should not have admitted this expert testimony for two reasons. First, Diaz claims that Vidal's expert testimony about the nature of the conspiracy and, particularly, the street price of drugs was irrelevant and did not assist the jury. See Fed.R.Evid. 702 (permitting expert testimony that will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or determine a fact at issue); Garcia- Morales, 382 F.3d at 18 ([E]xpert testimony . . . must be relevant to the task at hand and helpful to the jury in its deliberations.) (quoting United States v. Lopez-Lopez, 282 F.3d 1, 14 (1st Cir.2002) (internal quotation marks omitted)). Second, he argues that testimony about the nature of drug organizations was cumulative because government cooperators had already described this organization in detail and so allowance of expert testimony, to boot, was unfairly prejudicial. Both aspects of Vidal's testimony were relevant and helpful to the jury. The price of drugs helped the jury understand the vast amounts of money the conspirators could hope to make and the sheer volume of drugs involved. For example, Vidal testified that a kilogram of cocaine was worth $16,000 on the street in Puerto Rico in 2005. The 300-kilogram delivery was therefore worth $4.8 million. The conspiracy's three attempted deliveriesof 88, 27, and 300 kilograms of cocainehad a street value of $6.64 million. Drug smugglers handling such valuable drugs are unlikely to involve unknowledgeable outsiders. Vidal's testimony was not cumulative; none of the other witnesses explained how drug conspiracies work generally and, in that context, how the government understood this particular conspiracy operated. Even if Vidal's testimony was cumulative, which it was not, Rule 403 gave the trial court wide discretion to determine whether testimony was unfairly prejudicial or needlessly cumulative. See Fed.R.Evid. 403; see also United States v. Jimenez, 507 F.3d 13, 18 (1st Cir.2007). It did not abuse that discretion here.