Opinion ID: 1209937
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: the district court performed its gatekeeping role

Text: Although Mr. Nacchio argues that the district court abdicated its gatekeeping function, his argument really concerns the manner in which the district court fulfilled this role, e.g., allegedly failing to ensure the creation of a sufficiently developed record and declining to hold a hearing to reconsider Professor Fischel's admissibility. As discussed below, in its ruling the district court stated and applied the Daubert frameworkthe proper legal standard in determining the admissibility of expert testimonyand it properly performed its role as gatekeeper in deciding whether to admit or exclude Professor Fischel's expert testimony. Compare Rodriguez-Felix, 450 F.3d at 1125-26 (examining for an abuse of discretion the exclusion of expert testimony on the basis of a report that was insufficient to allow assessment of the reasoning and methodology of the expert as a component of the district court's application of Daubert), and United States v. Turner, 285 F.3d 909, 912-13 (10th Cir. 2002) (reviewing the denial of a Daubert hearing for abuse of discretion), with United States v. Call, 129 F.3d 1402, 1405 (10th Cir.1997) (rejecting the defendant's argument that the district court had applied a per se rule of inadmissibility instead of properly applying Daubert when the court had expressly stated and demonstrated that it applied Daubert ). Mr. Nacchio argues that the district court's ruling was premised upon Rule 16 and that, consequently, it was patently erroneous. We disagree. The district court's exclusion of Professor Fischel's testimony rested on Daubert grounds. True, the government first framed its challenge to Professor Fischel's expert testimony as an objection to the sufficiency of Mr. Nacchio's Rule 16 disclosure. But, by the time the district court ruled to exclude Professor Fischel's testimony, it was clear that the court's principal concern was Daubert. As is evident from its ruling, the district court excluded Professor Fischel's testimony because Mr. Nacchio had not met his burden of demonstrating admissibility as required by FRE 702. For example, after stating that Professor Fischel's testimony could be excluded on a number of grounds, the district court stated: Most convincingly, the defendant has made no attempt to comply with Rule 702 or Daubert and establish that Fischel's testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods or that Fischel applied some principles and methods reliably in this case. Aplt.App. 3915. Further, the district court stated that Rule 702 governs this issue. Id. This indicates that lack of reliability under FRE 702 was the primary rationale for the court's decision. [7] Although the district court ruling does include two ambiguous references to disclosures, when read in context, these references do not indicate that the exclusion was based upon allegedly incorrect Rule 16 grounds or that the district court was referring solely to Mr. Nacchio's Rule 16 disclosures. When a district court's language is ambiguous . . . it is improper for the court of appeals to presume that the lower court reached an incorrect legal conclusion. Sprint/United Mgmt. Co., 128 S.Ct. at 1146. First, the district court's enigmatic reference to these disclosures occurred in its ruling after the court had outlined the contents of the government's motion to exclude and indicated that it also had read Mr. Nacchio's response to the government's motion. It was from Mr. Nacchio's response to the motion to excluderather than from Mr. Nacchio's revised Rule 16 disclosurethat the district court quoted the sentence that it characterized as Mr. Nacchio's only representation on the issue of methodology, which the court found to be woefully inadequate to support the admissibility of Professor Fischel's testimony. Aplt.App. 3914, 3916. Thus, notwithstanding the these disclosures reference, the court's ruling was grounded in Daubert and FRE 702 methodology concerns. [8] Second, although the district court stated that Professor Fischel's methodology was undisclosed in this expert disclosure, the discussion immediately preceding that comment did not refer to Mr. Nacchio's Rule 16 disclosure. Aplt.App. 3917. Rather, the district court had just quoted from Mr. Nacchio's argumentmade in his response to the motion to exclude that Professor Fischel's opinions were proper under FRE 702. Compare Aplt. App. 3916 with Aplt.App. 466. At most, then, the district court's ruling contains two ambiguous references to disclosures that arise in the context of the district court's assessment of Mr. Nacchio's Daubert arguments. Although the district court did cite other bases for its ruling, including its doubt that Professor Fischel's testimony was relevant, [9] the decision to exclude Professor Fischel's expert testimony clearly was premised upon Mr. Nacchio's failure to establish that the testimony was reliable under Daubert and FRE 702a determination that was focused on Professor Fischel's methodology. We underscore, moreover, that to endorse the assertion that the district court made a ruling excluding the testimony on allegedly incorrect Rule 16 grounds alone would be particularly problematic in light of the instruction provided by the Supreme Court in Sprint. In light of the deference that is the hallmark of abuse-of-discretion review, we should not presume that a district court intended an incorrect legal result when the order is equally susceptible of a correct reading. Sprint, 128 S.Ct. at 1145, 1146 (internal quotation marks omitted). A fair, natural reading of the district court's decision indicates that the basis for the ruling was Daubert. And, the Supreme Court's guidance further demonstrates the impropriety of presuming that the district court based its ruling on purportedly erroneous Rule 16 grounds.