Opinion ID: 201143
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Employment Application

Text: 61 Tse attempted to attack Williams's character for truthfulness by asking Williams about allegedly false statements that Williams had made on an employment application in 1997. Although the court initially ruled that Tse could not question Williams about the application, it agreed to revisit the issue on the next day of trial. When Tse renewed his request the following day, he said he would use the employment application to refresh Williams's memory if Williams could not recall the statements he had made on the application. The government argued that Tse could question Williams about the application but could not use the application to refresh Williams's memory because doing so would be tantamount to using extrinsic evidence to impeach, which is expressly prohibited by Federal Rule of Evidence 608(b). 16 The court agreed with the government, noting that the alleged misrepresentations at issue in this case were collateral because they did not relate directly to any matter at issue in the case. The court allowed Tse to question Williams about the employment application but prohibited Tse from using the application itself to refresh Williams's memory. Tse's counsel asked Williams about only two statements on the employment application: the dates of his employment at the Gillette company, and the statement that he had been a student at Bunker Hill Community College. 17 62 District courts have broad discretion to determine whether to permit the refreshing of a witness's memory. See 28 Wright & Gold, Federal Practice and Procedure: Evidence § 6184 (1993). In this case, the district court was not obligated to allow Tse to refresh Williams's memory on the collateral issue of the content of the employment application. 18 Tse's questions about the employment application had no conceivable relevance other than to impeach Williams as untruthful. Using the employment application for this purpose would be a clear violation of Rule 608(b). The court acted well within its discretion in refusing to allow Tse to refresh Williams's memory on matters entirely collateral to the case. See United States v. Marino, 277 F.3d 11, 24 (1st Cir.2002) (excluding testimony contradicting the witness's characterization of his activities as a drug dealer as extrinsic evidence on a collateral matter in violation of Rule 608(b), even though the truthfulness of the witness's testimony was critical to the prosecution's case).