Court Opinion

ID: 9498132
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:08:52.203306+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:38.317822
License: Public Domain

ROGERS, Circuit Judge,
concurring.
I concur based on the particularly strong deference we properly accord discretionary evidentiary decisions made by the district court. In my view, a decision by the district court to admit the identification testimony of Dixon Jr., Alexander, and Weems would clearly have been within the district court’s discretion, and our decision today is not to the contrary.
The district court’s decision to exclude the testimony of Dixon Jr. and Alexander, in particular, tests the outer bounds of our deference. Someone who has lived with a defendant has presumably seen him in myriad contexts — asleep and awake, tired and energetic, happy and sad, angry and peaceful, morning and evening, etc., etc. Such a person is presumptively better able to identify the defendant in a photo than a juror who is comparing the photo with a one-time live view of the defendant.
In excluding the testimony, the district court relied on testimony by Dixon Jr. and Alexander that Dixon “looks the same” now as he did before'or during the period of the crime. Yet it is only natural that a person who has lived with a defendant, and become familiar with his many' faces, would consider all the faces to be permutations of the same familiar figure, and testify that the person has not changed. To exclude such evidence disregards such a commonsense explanation.
I would have been much -more comfortable affirming the admission of the Dixon Jr. and, Alexander identifications. However, affirmance is warranted when we accord the serious deference that is proper when we review discretionary evidentiary decisions of a district court, especially when those decisions are based in part on live testimony of the challenged witnéssi