Opinion ID: 198229
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Testimony Regarding Rosario's Drug Dealing

Text: 40 Alicia Ellerbee testified that she saw Rosario give a customer drugs--by spitting a baggie holding crack onto the ground--in exchange for money. Rosario's primary challenge to this evidence is that Ellerbee failed to provide a temporal proximity as to when these events occurred, and thus the testimony should have been excluded under Fed.R.Evid. 404(b). See Def. Br. at 36. 41 A close reading of the record reveals no such defect. The witness dated the event between the summer of 1994 and September 1995, see Tr. 10/10 at 88-89, and, more specifically, at around May of 1995. See id. at 89. The drug transaction fell squarely within the time frame of the charged conspiracy. 42 Further, Rosario argues that [s]ince the direct evidence against the Defendant is of such a tenuous nature, any fact directly linking the Defendant to the sale of crack would be extremely prejudicial. Def. Br. at 37. Aside from the obvious, that [b]y design, all evidence is meant to be prejudicial, United States v. Rodriguez-Estrada, 877 F.2d 153, 155 (1st Cir.1989), there is more than sufficient evidence establishing that Rosario was a distributor and member of the Rodrguez drug-trafficking organization. Rosario's argument here is part and parcel of his guilt by association theory: that he was not a co-conspirator, but a friend of Rodrguez's with the misfortune of continually being in the wrong place at the wrong time when drugs were present. This argument was presented to the jurors, and rejected by them. There is no reason to quarrel with their verdict. 43 Finally, Rosario claims that the court exacerbated [the] prejudice, Def. Br. at 38, of Ellerbee's testimony by foreclosing cross-examination into her attempted suicide and an incident in which she supposedly tried to burn her hair. The district court properly found that the evidence was not relevant either to her ability to tell the truth or to her partiality. 44