Court Opinion

ID: 9483994
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 09:37:27.895395+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:57.338001
License: Public Domain

*910LOUIS H. POLLAK, District Judge,
concurring:
I join the judgment and opinion of the court. I write separately only to underscore the correctness of the court’s treatment of the other-acts issue.
In her opinion for the court, Judge Kearse states that:
Rule 404(b) does not authorize the admission of any and every sort of other-act evidence simply because a defendant proffers an innocent explanation for the charged conduct.... To the contrary, “evidence of another act should not be admitted to show knowledge unless the other act is ‘sufficiently similar to the conduct at issue to permit the jury reasonably to draw from the act the knowledge inference advocated by the proponent of the evidence.’ ”
Judge Miner’s dissenting opinion does not challenge this general principle. Instead, the dissent argues that in this instance “the showing of similarity [between Gordon’s possession of crack and a triple-beam scale in Greensboro in 1990 and his encounter with Ghullkie at JFK in 1991] is sufficient.” I disagree. For the reasons set forth by Judge Kearse, I conclude that the similarity standard implicit in Rule 404(b) does not authorize the admission of the Greensboro testimony — and, further, that, even if admissible under Rule 404(b), the Greensboro testimony would fail the Rule 403 test of prejudice.
What particularly impels me to file a concurrence is the dissent’s suggestion that conformity with Rule 404(b)’s similarity standard does not need to be scrupulously respected in cases involving narcotics. The dissent quotes the observation by Judge Weinstein and Professor Berger, in their splendid treatise, that “[I]n narcotics cases there seems to [be] far less insistence on similarity.” 2 Jack B. Weinstein & Margaret A. Berger, Weinstein’s Evidence ¶ 404[12], at 404-74 to 404-75 (1992).
However, the quoted observation is, from a doctrinal perspective, a weak reed — it appears to be a descriptive, not a prescriptive, pronouncement. Some of the cases cited by Judge Weinstein and Professor Berger in documentation of the observation seem to take a spacious view of similarity, others less so;1 but none of them purports to state, as a matter of law, that, when applied in narcotics cases, the Rule 404(b) similarity standard is more relaxed than in other contexts — i.e., becomes a double standard.
Moreover, the only one of the cases cited by Judge Weinstein and Professor Berger that was decided by this court—United States v. Roldan-Zapata, 916 F.2d 795 (2d Cir.1990), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 111 S.Ct. 1397, 113 L.Ed.2d 453 (1991) — is a case which, in sustaining the admission at trial of certain other-act evidence, clearly illustrates the standard of similarity which the Greensboro testimony admitted against Gordon falls far short of.
In Roldan-Zapata, two defendants — Oscar Roldan-Zapata and Pedro Osario-Ser-na — were charged with conspiring to distribute and to possess with intent to distribute more than five kilograms of cocaine. In addition, Osario-Serna was charged with the substantive offense of possession of more than five kilograms of cocaine with intent to distribute. At trial, a principal government witness was one Eric Akiva, a co-defendant who pleaded guilty and testified against his accomplices. Both Roldan-Zapata and Osario-Serna were convicted. One of Osario-Serna’s contentions on appeal was that the district court had erred in permitting Akiva to give testimony with respect to other drug transactions involving Osario-Serna and himself. In rejecting Osario-Serna’s objection to Akiva’s other-act testimony, this court said the following:
Akiva testified to his previous cocaine transactions with Osario-Serna, which the defendant challenges as inadmissible evidence of uncharged prior similar acts. Akiva testified that to help pay off a debt to his dealer in Miami, he had twice agreed to deliver packages of cocaine received from Osario-Serna and was to receive an additional credit for delivering *911the cocaine received on March 10. Akiva also described one of the prior drug deals where both he and Osario-Serna were present. Osario-Serna claims that this evidence was impermissibly elicited for the purpose of showing his propensity to commit such crimes, in violation of Fed. R.Evid. 404(b), and, further, that its probative value was outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice in violation of Rule 403. We reject both claims.
Rule 404(b) allows evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts to be admitted for purposes other than showing a propensity to act in a certain manner, such as “proof of motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, or absence of mistake or accident.” Under the “inclusionary” approach to the rule followed by this circuit, such evidence “is admissible for any purpose other than to show a defendant’s criminal propensity.” United States v. Harris, 733 F.2d 994, 1006 (2d Cir.1984).
Here, the prior act evidence was admissible “to inform the jury of the background of the conspiracy charged,” id., “to complete the story of the crimes charged,” United States v. Brennan, 798 F.2d 581, 589 (2d Cir.1986), cert. denied, 490 U.S. 1022, 109 S.Ct. 1750, 104 L.Ed.2d 187 (1989), and to “help[] explain to the jury how the illegal relationship between [participants in the crime] developed,” id. at 590. The pre-existing drug-trafficking relationship between Akiva and Osario-Serna furthered the jury’s understanding of how the instant transaction came about and their role in it. This evidence, which represented only a tiny fraction of the testimony heard by the jury, and did not involve conduct any more sensational or disturbing than the crimes with which Osario-Serna was charged, see United States v. Siegel, 717 F.2d 9, 16-17 (2d Cir.1983), did not unfairly prejudice Osario-Serna so as to warrant exclusion under Role 403.
Id. at 804.
The difficulty with other-act evidence like the Greensboro testimony admitted against Gordon in the case at bar was pin-pointed by the First Circuit in its opinion in a closely comparable case, United States v. Lynn, 856 F.2d 430 (1st Cir.1988).2 There, the defendant, one Steven Lynn, was charged with participation in a conspiracy to import large amounts of marijuana and hashish from Taiwan and Pakistan in 1981. At trial the government was permitted to introduce evidence of a 1974 arrest and conviction for possession of marijuana with intent to distribute. Lynn was convicted and appealed. In discussing Lynn’s challenge to the other-act evidence, the First Circuit pointed out that “Rule 404(b) codifies the common law prohibition against the admission of propensity of evidence— that is, evidence presented to encourage the inference that because the defendant committed a crime once before, he is the type of person to commit the crime currently charged;” and the First Circuit then went on to explain that “[ejvidence of prior bad conduct is, however, often admitted for other relevant and legitimate reasons not intended to reflect upon the character of the accused” — e.g., proof of intent or knowledge. Id. at 434-35.
Applying these principles to the case before it, the First Circuit said:
As we have stated, the prior bad acts must have some “special” relevance to something other than propensity — in this case the intent of Lynn to participate in the conspiracy. In other words, there must be some articulable inference for the jury to draw from the previous offense other than that the defendant had the bad character and therefore more probably had the intent to commit the crime he is now charged with. With these considerations at hand, the proba*912tive worth of Lynn’s conviction toward proving his intent to commit the instant offense is difficult to conceptualize. The states of mind of someone who consummated a street sale to an undercover agent and one who participated in an international smuggling conspiracy are connected primarily by the fact that both engage in criminal enterprises involving drugs. The ordinary inference here would seem very close to the inference the Rule was designed to avoid.
Id. at 436 (footnotes omitted).
The reasons adduced by the First Circuit for finding error in the admission of the other-act evidence in Lynn are precisely applicable to the case at bar.

. The cases are listed in Weinstein's Evidence, supra, at 404-75 n. 14.

. One respect in which Lynn and the case at bar are not comparable is that the time interval between the prior offense and the offense charged was considerably longer in Lynn.
Lynn is one of the cases cited by Judge Wein-stein and Professor Berger in documenting their obsfervation that there is "less insistence on similarity” in narcotics cases, but it is cited with a prefatory “But see.” Weinstein's Evidence, supra, at 404-75 n. 14.