Opinion ID: 2977404
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Garcia’s Expert Testimony

Text: Geiger also argues that the district court abused its discretion when it excluded the testimony of Garcia. The defense hired Garcia to investigate and analyze the Mariposa Mines in 2003 to assign a dollar value to the project and later called him to testify that the mines had considerable gold deposits in an effort to establish that USA Mining was not completely insolvent. Garcia was prepared to offer his estimate that the Mariposa Mines contained approximately $630,000,000 in gold, but the district court excluded his testimony, explaining that the “gold content” figure was both potentially misleading to the jury because it did not account for the cost of extraction and irrelevant 8 as to Geiger’s intent in carrying out the alleged scheme with Combs. Geiger asserts that Garcia’s valuation testimony makes the existence of fraud less likely by showing that Geiger had valuable assets that he could stake against the amounts he borrowed from the SCT pension funds. However, because we find that Garcia’s testimony does not bear on Geiger’s overall scheme, its exclusion was not an abuse of discretion by the district court. See United States v. Webster, 125 F.3d 1024, 1032-34 (7th Cir. 1997) (deeming proper the district court’s exclusion of evidence of value of defendant’s property where the valuation was unrelated to defendant’s intent regarding the crime at issue).