Court Opinion

ID: 9890593
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-10-13 18:01:12.342415+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:25:35.485671
License: Public Domain

Case: 22-10316     Document: 00516930184         Page: 1     Date Filed: 10/13/2023

           United States Court of Appeals
                for the Fifth Circuit                                 United States Court of Appeals
                                                                               Fifth Circuit

                                ____________                                 FILED
                                                                       October 13, 2023
                                  No. 22-10316                          Lyle W. Cayce
                                ____________                                 Clerk

   United States of America,

                                                             Plaintiff—Appellee,

                                       versus

   Howard Sanford Williams,

                                           Defendant—Appellant.
                  ______________________________

                  Appeal from the United States District Court
                      for the Northern District of Texas
                           USDC No. 3:20-CR-638-1
                  ______________________________

   Before Smith, Southwick, and Higginson, Circuit Judges.
   Jerry E. Smith, Circuit Judge:
          Howard Williams was convicted of sex trafficking of a child in viola-
   tion of 18 U.S.C. § 1591(a)(1) and (b)(2). On appeal, he challenges the intro-
   duction of evidence pulled from his cellphone using Cellebrite technology.
   He claims that the district court erred by permitting a police investigator to
   introduce the Cellebrite extract without first being qualified as an expert
   under Federal Rule of Evidence 702.
          On this matter of first impression, we disagree. When law enforce-
   ment uses Cellebrite to pull information from a phone and a lay juror would
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                                    No. 22-10316

   require no additional interpretation to understand that information, the party
   does not need to introduce the evidence through an expert. We affirm.

                                         I.
          Williams, 37, met his 16-year-old victim, Jane Doe, on Tagged, a social
   media/dating application. She was ranting about her difficulties at home, so
   Williams invited her to go out and smoke marihuana, presumably to forget
   about her troubles. He picked her up at a school near her house and drove to
   the nearby Lake Arlington. While they smoked, she complained about her
   toxic home life and said she did not want to return home. He offered to get
   her a hotel room, and Doe agreed. Williams checked Doe into an extended
   stay hotel, and, for the next five days, Williams kept her high and drunk, had
   sex with her, and pimped her out using several websites.
          After five days, Doe left the hotel, went to the hospital with her
   mother, and reported that she had been sex-trafficked. A police officer inter-
   viewed her, and she provided a photograph of Williams from her phone.
   Police arrested Williams a few days later, and he gave a recorded statement.
   In that statement, Williams admitted that he bought the hotel room for Doe,
   had sex with her twice, “lined up dudes” for her, gave her drugs, collected
   money from her prostitution, and communicated with the customers.
          After his arrest, the police used a Cellebrite device to copy the infor-
   mation off Williams’s and Doe’s mobile phones. To use the device, an
   investigator merely plugged each phone into it and ran the program. The
   program pulled out the user data—including any messages, videos, or emails
   sent, received, or recently deleted—along with the apps used on the phone,
   and provided it to the police in an accessible, easily-navigable, and readable
   format. Williams’s Alcatel phone, being less technologically cohesive than a
   Samsung or Apple phone, required an additional file system extraction to
   copy everything on the device. But, beyond that step, the process and the

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   product were the same for the two phones.
          At trial, the prosecution introduced evidence taken from the Celle-
   brite extractions of both Williams’s and his victim’s phones, the recorded
   statement Williams gave to the police, testimony from Doe, messages
   obtained from another messaging service not at issue, and more. In a denied
   motion in limine, Williams objected to the use of the Cellebrite testimony
   without an expert witness to introduce it, and he renewed his objection at
   trial. On voir dire, the police investigator disavowed any particular knowledge
   of Cellebrite’s technology or of any malware that may have affected the data
   extraction. The district court then overruled Williams’s objection, and the
   investigator testified to (1) his certifications as a Cellebrite Operator and a
   Cellebrite Physical Analyzer, (2) the data-extraction process, and (3) the
   evidence he obtained.
          On appeal, Williams claims that it was reversible error for the court to
   admit the Cellebrite testimony without an expert witness and a finding of
   reliability. We disagree.

                                         II.
          We review preserved challenges to evidentiary rulings for an abuse of
   discretion. United States v. Caldwell, 586 F.3d 338, 341 (5th Cir. 2009). “A
   trial court abuses its discretion when it bases its decision on an erroneous
   view of the law or a clearly erroneous assessment of the evidence.” Id.
   Further, an evidentiary error is harmless if it would not have a substantial
   impact on the jury’s verdict. United States v. Williams, 957 F.2d 1238, 1244
   (5th Cir. 1992) (citing United States v. Bernal, 814 F.2d 175, 184 (5th Cir.
   1987)). “Unless there is a reasonable possibility that the improperly admitted
   evidence contributed to the conviction, reversal is not required.” United
   States v. Okulaja, 21 F.4th 338, 344 (5th Cir. 2021) (internal quotation marks
   and citation omitted).

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          Federal Rule of Evidence 602 permits a witness to provide fact testi-
   mony if he has personal knowledge of the matter. Accordingly, lay witnesses
   can testify “so long as the witness does not base his or her opinion for
   scientific, technical or other specialized knowledge within the scope of
   Rule 702.” Caldwell, 586 F.3d at 348. To that end, in Caldwell, we permitted
   a software company employee to testify how a particular software operated
   without being qualified as an expert witness under Rule 702 because of the
   “prevalence of computer technology” and because the opinion the employee
   was providing was “within the realm of knowledge of the average lay
   person.” Id.

                                         III.
          We find no error, much less an abuse of discretion. Williams claims
   that Cellebrite is a complex technology, ergo, the operation of Cellebrite
   requires specialized knowledge, and the introduction of a Cellebrite report
   demands qualification of a witness as an expert. But this ignores the basic
   realities of life. All the officer did was run a computer program. He offered
   no technical understanding of the machine or software; he did not write the
   program; and he did not opine on any application of specialized knowledge.
          During trial, the investigator explained that “[a]s an operator, I purely
   operate the machine. I am not privy to the programming or how it extracts
   data.” Thus, he explicitly disclaimed that he was offering expert testimony.
   This is the antithesis of Rule 702’s requirement of “scientific, technical, or
   other specialized knowledge.” Fed. R. Evid. 702(a). Rather, the investi-
   gator knew no more than anyone else who runs a program on his computer
   that he did not write.
          Every circuit that has addressed this question—whether evidence
   obtained with Cellebrite technology requires expert testimony for
   admission—has answered it in the negative. In Chavez-Lopez, the Fourth

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   Circuit concluded that the sponsoring witness offered only fact testimony,
   such as “the actions he took to extract the data—hooking the phones up to a
   computer, following a few prompts, and saving data onto an external drive.”
   767 F. App’x 431, 434 (4th Cir. 2019). “At most, [the witness] offered the
   opinion that Cellebrite copies data from a cellphone, which he derived from
   his personal experience using the software.” Id. That testimony “didn’t
   require a technical understanding of Cellebrite, and he made no claims about
   the program’s effectiveness or reliability.” Id.
          Similarly, in United States v. Marsh, the witness merely described his
   training, explained how he used the software, and “confirmed the results by
   checking the [text] messages on the phone itself.” 568 F. App’x 15, 17 (2d
   Cir. 2014). And in United States v. Ovies, the Ninth Circuit reached the same
   result. 783 F. App’x 704, 707 (9th Cir. 2019), cert. denied, 140 S. Ct. 820
   (2020). Reasoning similarly to the Fourth Circuit in Chavez-Lopez, the Ninth
   Circuit found that the witness’s testimony was not based on technical or
   specialized knowledge, as he “testified only about the steps he took using the
   Cellebrite program” and “did not opine as to the reliability” of Cellebrite.
   Id. An unpublished opinion of this circuit has also described a Cellebrite
   extraction as a “rote process” in a Confrontation Clause challenge. United
   States v. Rubio, No. 21-50886, 2022 WL 17246937, at *2 (5th Cir. Nov. 28,
   2022) (unpublished).
          Williams claims that the Sixth Circuit reached a contrary result in
   United States v. Ganier, 468 F.3d 920 (6th Cir. 2006). But that misreads
   Ganier. First, Ganier does not mention, much less consider, Cellebrite. Sec-
   ond, even if it had, the computer reports at issue in Ganier are entirely dis-
   similar to a Cellebrite report. If, as in Ganier, we compare the Cellebrite
   report to other areas of expert testimony, this report is more like the “outputs
   of popular software programs” that an “average layperson today may be able
   to interpret . . . as easily as he or she interprets everyday vernacular” than the

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   “slang and code words used by drug dealers” a police officer needs “special-
   ized knowledge” to interpret. Id. at 926.
           We join our sister circuits. All the investigator testified to was how he
   downloaded the information from the phones using Cellebrite technology.
   At no point did he speak to the reliability of the software, except that he
   double-checked some of the report by looking directly at the source material
   in the phones themselves. To that end, he did not state any information on
   how Cellebrite operated in a technical sense, nor information that was beyond
   the knowledge of an average cell phone user. The investigator did not “impli-
   citly vouch for the accuracy or reliability of Cellebrite’s software,” as Wil-
   liams claims. Rather, the investigator acknowledged his lack of knowledge
   about the software and stated that he was merely an operator. Notably, the
   cross-examination of the investigator did not probe the reliability of Celle-
   brite technology.
           Without a showing of specialized knowledge, the mere use and under-
   standing of a Cellebrite extract at trial is insufficient to require an expert.1
   Operating a Cellebrite device and understanding its report require knowledge
   in the realm of a reasonably tech-savvy lay person, regardless of the investi-
   gator’s testimony that he was a “certified” operator and analyzer.
           If we took Williams’s argument to its logical end, district courts would
   need a mechanic to qualify as an expert just to testify that a car with a flat tire
   ran a red light. That is not the requirement of Rule 702. The district court

           _____________________
           1
             Again, we highlight that the district court allowed voir dire of the investigator to
   address whether specialized knowledge would be imparted. Cf. United States v. Wehrle,
   985 F.3d 549, 559 (7th Cir. 2021) (St. Eve, J., concurring) (“There are cases in which the
   collection of digital data would require testimony due, for example, to the sophisticated
   nature of the particular forensic analysis or the equipment deployed, or the technical nature
   of the testimony. But this is not one of those cases.”)

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   properly ruled that Rule 701 governs here.

                                         IV.
          Williams also avers that the investigator’s testimony about his Celle-
   brite certifications indicated to the jury that the investigator was more trust-
   worthy than a typical lay witness. Admitting the investigator’s testimony was
   neither error nor an abuse of discretion. Even if it were, though, it was harm-
   less error. Evidentiary decisions are subject to harmless-error review, and
   “[u]nless there is a reasonable possibility that the improperly admitted evi-
   dence contributed to the conviction, reversal is not required.” Okulaja,
   21 F.4th at 344 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). The evi-
   dence of Williams’s guilt was overwhelming, particularly considering Willi-
   ams’s recorded confession. Thus, any erroneously admitted testimony by
   the investigator had, at best, a “very slight effect[,]” making it harmless. Kot-
   teakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 764–65 (1946); see also Williams,
   957 F.2d at 1244.
          AFFIRMED.

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