Opinion ID: 3216831
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Admission of Cuevas’s Phone Calls

Text: In 2004 a federal judge in the Southern District of Florida authorized telephone wiretaps based upon a DEA agent’s affidavit stating that the “target telephones will be located overseas” and that the “intercepts will be conducted from, and monitored in, the Southern District of Florida.” A confidential DEA source then provided the monitored phones to targets in Colombia. The Government intercepted Cuevas discussing his operations on two calls, which it played at trial during the testimony of the other party to the recorded calls. Cuevas argues the tapes were inadmissible because federal law prohibits foreign surveillance and because the federal judge who approved the wiretaps lacked jurisdiction to do so. Cuevas forfeited these arguments by failing to raise them in the district court, so we consider them at most for plain error. United States v. Williams, 773 F.3d 98, 105 (D.C. Cir. 2014); see also United States v. Burroughs, 810 F.3d 833, 837–38 (D.C. Cir. 2016). First, Cuevas’s contention that extraterritorial surveillance is prohibited because “Title III . . . has no extraterritorial force” reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the statute. Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 “imposes . . . limitations on the use of electronic 43 surveillance.” United States v. Chavez, 416 U.S. 580, 580 (1974). If it does not apply extraterritorially, then government surveillance outside the United States is unconstrained, not forbidden, by Title III. Second, Cuevas’s contention that a “listening post” in the Southern District of Florida was insufficient to confer jurisdiction upon the federal court there is unavailing if only because every circuit that has considered the question has deemed a listening post sufficient. See, e.g., United States v. Luong, 471 F.3d 1107, 1109 (9th Cir. 2006); United States v. Rodriguez, 968 F.2d 130, 136 (2d Cir. 1992). With no “controlling precedent” or “other absolutely clear legal norm” to support Cuevas’s position, the purported error by the district court, if error it be, cannot be deemed plain. See United States v. Nwoye, 663 F.3d 460, 466 (D.C. Cir. 2011).