Opinion ID: 218928
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Admission of Excerpts From Sacco's Autobiography

Text: At trial, the government offered in evidence eight passages from Sacco's autobiography, in which Sacco had written of his sexual attraction to children and described, inter alia, his sexual acts against [his] little sister and her girlfriends while they were asleep. The district court admitted four of the proffered excerpts in full, excluded three, and admitted only part of another. Sacco does not challenge the admissibility of the excerpts under Fed.R.Evid. 413 (authorizing the admission, in a criminal case in which the defendant is accused of sexual assault, of relevant evidence of the defendant's commission of another offense or offenses of sexual assault), and Fed.R.Evid. 414 (authorizing the admission, in a criminal case in which the defendant is accused of child molestation, of relevant evidence of the defendant's commission of another offense or offenses of child molestation). Rather, Sacco contends that all of the passages should have been excluded pursuant to Fed.R.Evid. 403 on the ground that their potential for unfair prejudice substantially outweighed their probative value. Sacco, age 48 when he abused S.O., argues that the autobiography, written shortly before 2000, at most described his thoughts and conduct as a teenager, and thus that they lacked probative value because they were too remote in time. We reject this conclusion. The trial court's decision not to exclude evidence pursuant to Rule 403 is reviewed only for abuse of discretion. See, e.g., United States v. Larson, 112 F.3d 600, 604-05 (2d Cir.1997) ( Larson ). Courts confronted with remote-in-time evidence offered under Rule 413 or Rule 414 should conduct a fact-specific and case-specific analysis: Exclusion of proof of other acts that are too remote in time caters principally to the dual concerns for relevance and reliability. The evaluation of the proffered evidence in light of these concerns must be made on a case-by-case basis to determine whether the significance of the prior acts has become too attenuated and whether the memories of the witnesses has likely become too frail. Neither Rule 403 nor any analogous Rule provides any bright-line rule as to how old is too old. Larson, 112 F.3d at 605. In Larson, we found no abuse of discretion in the admission of testimony about acts that occurred 16 to 20 years before the trial where [t]he similarity of the events clearly demonstrated the ... testimony's relevance. Id.; see also United States v. Davis, 624 F.3d 508, 512 (2d Cir.2010) (no abuse of discretion in the admission of testimony about conduct occurring some 19 years earlier). In the present case, the district court plainly conducted a Rule 403 balancing analysis; it excluded some of the proffered excerpts on the ground that they were cumulative or that their probative value was outweighed by the potential for unfair prejudice. ( See Tr. 696.) The excerpts that were admitted plainly had high probative value that outweighed any potential for unfair prejudice; they included descriptions of Sacco entering rooms in which young girls were asleep and sexually molesting them  conduct that partially paralleled S.O.'s description of Sacco's first molestation of her. And an excerpt describing an interest in child pornography was consistent with S.O.'s testimony that Sacco forced her to pose for pornographic photographs. Further, the present case does not involve the usual concerns as to memory or reliability; the passages had been written by Sacco himself. And although Sacco suggests that his predilections as a teenager should be discounted, pointing out that the acts described in his autobiography occurred more than 30 years before his conduct with S.O. and thus were more remote in time than the conduct at issue in the above cases, that argument rings hollow in light of the evident relish with which he wrote the passages just seven years before his molestation of S.O. We see no abuse of discretion in the admission of this evidence.