Opinion ID: 609734
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: quashing of subpoenas of springfield police officers

Text: 83 During direct examination, government witness Scott gave the following account of an incident that allegedly occurred during his cooperation with the DEA. On November 27, 1987, prior to Callahan's agreement to cooperate with the government, two DEA agents wired Scott with a hidden recording device and brought him to a bar to meet and record a conversation with Callahan. After the meeting, the agents agreed to allow Scott to stop by his girlfriend's house before returning to DEA headquarters. Scott went into the house--leaving the agents waiting in the car outside--and was arrested by officers of the Springfield police department who coincidentally were raiding the house as part of an unrelated investigation. 84 According to Scott's testimony, one officer searched Scott and found nothing. Then a second officer searched Scott and purported to find vials of cocaine. Scott was taken to police headquarters and charged with possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Scott testified that he did not have any cocaine in his possession on this occasion, and would never have carried cocaine in such a situation since he knew it was standard procedure for the DEA agents to search him thoroughly each time he returned to the vehicle. Scott testified that after being released by the Springfield police officers he contacted the DEA agents to complain about the arrest--he thought at first that the arrest had been a ploy by the DEA, in conjunction with the Springfield police, to get him under their thumb--and that subsequently the charges were dismissed and he was not prosecuted. 7 85 Following this testimony, several of the defendants sought to subpoena the Springfield police officers involved in this incident in an attempt to prove that Scott did in fact possess cocaine on that evening. The district court quashed the subpoenas, finding that the proposed testimony was inadmissible under Fed.R.Evid. 608(b), which provides that [s]pecific instances of the conduct of a witness, for the purposes of attacking or supporting the witness' credibility, other than conviction of a crime as provided in rule 609, may not be proved by extrinsic evidence. 86 Defendants argue that the officers' proposed testimony was not excluded by Rule 608(b), because defendants did not seek merely to impeach Scott's credibility through extrinsic evidence of a prior bad act but also sought to contradict a specific assertion made by him during his direct testimony, thereby showing that he had lied before the jury in the very case. Nevertheless, the proposed contradiction involved a matter collateral to the main issues in this trial, since the Springfield incident did not in any way involve any of the defendants or the charges against them. A court may, indeed normally does, preclude a party from proving with extrinsic evidence that a witness lied in court on a collateral matter. See United States v. Tejada, 886 F.2d 483, 489 (1st Cir.1989); Walker v. Firestone Tire & Rubber Co., 412 F.2d 60, 63 (2d Cir.1969). Here, the district court was justified in preventing a major detour into this essentially irrelevant episode. 87 Defendants say that the Springfield officers' testimony was relevant because it showed that Scott continued to use cocaine even after his cooperation with the DEA, which rebutted his testimony that he contacted the DEA because he knew what we were doing was totally and completely wrong and wanted to make things right. But Scott admitted on cross-examination that he used cocaine long after he began to cooperate with the DEA, in fact up until a couple of months prior to the trial. Thus, the Springfield episode was at best cumulative evidence, and given the diversion involved to procure it, properly excluded as duplicative on this issue. Any claim by Scott as to the purity of his motive was undoubtedly discounted by the jury since Scott received $250,000 from the government, as well as other benefits. 88