In United States v. Hawkins, No. 17-11560 (Aug. 20,
2019) (Antoon (M.D. Fla.), Newsom, Tjoflat), the Court affirmed in part but vacated several drug convictions.
First, the Court upheld the denial of a motion to suppress
wiretap evidence, rejecting the argument that the wiretap applications did not
meet the "necessity" requirement of Title III. The accompanying affidavits described other
investigative techniques already employed and that proved unsuccessful, and the
good-faith exception applied in any event.
The Court also upheld the denial of a motion to suppress evidence seized
during a traffic stop because there was a probable cause of a traffic
violation, namely changing lanes on the interstate without using a turn signal.
Second, the Court rejected the defendant's argument that the
evidence at trial on a conspiracy count diverged from the allegations in the
indictment, resulting in a constructive amendment or variance.
However, the Court agreed with the defendants that the lead
case agent—the government's primary witness at trial—went beyond the bounds of
permissible expert testimony by repeatedly providing speculative interpretive commentary
about the meaning of phone calls and text messages and by giving his opinions
about what was occurring during and in between those communications. Rather than interpreting drug codes or common
practices, which an expert may do, he interpreted unambiguous language in
conversations, mixed expert opinion with fact testimony, and synthesized the
trial evidence for the jury, straying into speculation and unfettered, wholesale
interpretation of the evidence. The
Court concluded that this met all of the requirements of plain-error review,
emphasizing that the agent was paraded to the jury as an expert, often went
beyond mere lay opinion testimony, and at times played the role of both expert and
lay witness, and that the agent was the government's main witness who testified
for more than half of the trial.
