United States District Court, E.D. Michigan, Southern Division
OPINION AND ORDER ON DEFENDANTS' MOTIONS
CHALLENGING PLAINTIFF'S EXPERT WITNESSES
DAVID
M. LAWSON UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
Presently
before the Court are motions by the defendants challenging
the use at trial of testimony by four of the plaintiff's
expert witnesses, in which the defendants variously argue
that the experts are unqualified, or their opinions are
unreliable or irrelevant (or all three). The substance and
admissibility of each expert's opinion is discussed in
turn below.
I.
As
discussed in the several opinions issued in this case,
plaintiff Davontae Sanford filed this case in 2017, alleging
that he was wrongfully convicted of a quadruple homicide
allegedly committed when he was fourteen years old. He
contends that defendants Michael Russell and James Tolbert -
Detroit police officers - manufactured evidence against him,
and used that evidence to coerce a confession from him, to
prosecute him for the homicides, and to coerce a guilty plea
from him during his bench trial in 2008. After he spent over
eight years in prison, another person confessed to committing
the murders, and a state police investigation uncovered
evidence that Sanford's confession and ensuing guilty
plea were the product of misconduct by the defendants. His
conviction was set aside and all charges against him were
dismissed in 2016.
The
defendants challenge the opinions of Dr. Jeffrey Aaron, a
psychologist who will testify to the psychological damage
suffered by Sanford caused by his wrongful conviction and
eight years in prison. Dr. Aaron also intends to give
opinions on the reliability of Sanford's confession and
the nature of the interrogation conducted by defendant
Russell. The defendants also move to exclude the testimony of
David Balash, a police practices expert. They also challenge
the opinions of Dr. Allison Redlich, a psychologist and
criminologist, who intends to offer testimony about false
confessions and false guilty pleas. Last, the defendants move
to prevent testimony from James Trainum, another police
practices expert, who intends to comment on the propriety of
the defendants' actions during the investigation and
prosecution of the plaintiff.
II.
These
motions invoke Federal Rule of Evidence 702 and cases
interpreting that rule. The following general principles
govern all four of these motions.
As a
general matter, “expert” testimony consists of
opinions or commentary grounded in “specialized
knowledge, ” that is, knowledge that is “beyond
the ken of the average juror.” See United
States v. Rios, 830 F.3d 403, 413 (6th Cir. 2016),
cert. denied sub nom. Casillas v. United
States, 137 S.Ct. 1120 (2017), and cert.
denied, 138 S.Ct. 2701 (2018); see also Fed. R.
Evid. 702. Such testimony is governed by Evidence Rule 702,
which was modified in December 2000 to reflect the Supreme
Court's emphasis in Daubert v. Merrell Dow
Pharmaceuticals., Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993), and
Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137 (1999),
on the trial court's gate-keeping obligation to conduct a
preliminary assessment of relevance and reliability whenever
a witness testifies to an opinion based on specialized
knowledge. Rule 702 states:
A
witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill,
experience, training, or education may testify in the form of
an opinion or otherwise if:
(a) the expert's scientific, technical, or other
specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to
understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue;
(b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data;
(c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and
methods; and
(d) the expert has reliably applied the principles and
methods to the facts of the case.
The
language added by the 2000 amendment - subparagraphs (b)
through (d) - restates Daubert's insistence on
the requirements that an expert's opinion be based on a
foundation grounded in the actual facts of the case, that the
opinion is valid according to the discipline that furnished
the base of special knowledge, and that the expert
appropriately “fits” the facts of the case into
the theories and methods he or she espouses. See
Daubert, 509 U.S. at 591-93.
A. Dr.
Jeffrey Aaron
Dr.
Jeffrey Aaron is a licensed clinical and forensic
psychologist from Virginia who is employed in private
practice and with the Virginia Department of Behavioral
Health and Developmental Services. It appears that the
plaintiff intends to call him as a damages expert. He intends
to offer the following opinions - detailed in his 30-page
report - at trial:
1. Mr. Sanford suffered substantial psychological harm from
each of the following: his arrest and interrogation; his
experiences as a defendant in the legal process; the finding
of guilt and his sentencing; [and] his experiences [while]
incarcerated over the time from his arrest in September 2007
until his exoneration and release in June 2016.
2. The harm Mr. Sanford suffered from these events is
distinct from the consequences of other stressful and
traumatic events that he has experienced. However, the
multiple traumas he experienced in prison almost certainly
had more damaging effects than they otherwise would have as a
consequence of his prior traumatic experiences.
3. The harm Mr. Sanford suffered from these events has a
substantial and ongoing effect on his mental health, his
capacity for subjective pleasure, his interpersonal
relationships, and his general capacity and functioning.
4. The harm Mr. Sanford suffered from these events will
almost certainly continue far into the future. In order to
minimize this harm, Mr. Sanford will require extensive and
intensive ongoing supports. Without such supports, his
prognosis for adequate functioning, the resolution of his
mental health problems, and for a positive quality of life is
poor.
Report
of Dr. Jeffrey Aaron dated July 26, 2018, ECF No. 130-9,
PageID.4383.
Dr.
Aaron based his conclusions on 12 hours of personal
interviews with the plaintiff, interviews with other persons
who know him, an extensive catalog of educational,
correctional, and medical records and evaluations of the
plaintiff by other professionals spanning more than 17 years,
and a review of court records from the criminal proceeding.
The
defendants do not challenge Dr. Aaron's qualifications
generally as a clinical or forensic psychologist, the methods
he employed in reaching his conclusions, or his application
of his methods to the facts of the case. Instead, they
challenge on relevancy grounds the propriety of admitting
certain statements from the report indicating that (1) the
plaintiff's confession was unreliable and false; (2) the
interrogation by defendant Russell was “intense,
stressful, frightening, and confusing” for the
plaintiff; and (3) the plaintiff “was not able to
engage in a normal adolescent social experience, such as
going to high school and graduating, ” and he
“would not have had to readjust to leaving prison and
re-entering society had he not pled guilty to the Runyon
Street Murder.”
The
defendants' arguments fall into two broad categories.
They first challenge what they perceive to be an opinion by
Dr. Aaron that Sanford's confession was false. Second,
they contend that allowing Aaron to expound on details of
Sanford's life and his subjective feelings before,
during, and after his incarceration would not be grounded in
any specialized knowledge, since the jury does not need help
to understand Sanford's own testimony about those things,
which he presumably will offer, and, moreover, any opinion
that Sanford would not have gone to prison if he had not been
wrongly convicted is entirely speculative.
Taking
the second argument first, Dr. Aaron's discussion about
the plaintiff's past and present life situations, and his
feelings about his prison experience, is not simply an
untethered exegesis on the plaintiff's state of mind.
Instead, those discussions provide the background for the
opinion on damages. Isolating that component of the report,
as the defendants have done in their argument, ignores the
requirement that an expert's opinion must be based on the
actual facts of the case. See Lee v. Smith & Wesson
Corp., 760 F.3d 523, 529 (6th Cir. 2014) (Keith, J.
dissenting) (“The ‘relevancy' prong of Rule
702 requires that an expert's theory adequately
‘fit' the facts of the case. Expert testimony that
does not fit the facts does not relate to an issue in the
case and, therefore, is not relevant.”) (citing
Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals., Inc., 509
U.S. 579, 591 (1993)).
Challenging
the opinion on the reliability of the confession, the
defendants argue that (1) Dr. Aaron's testimony is
irrelevant because whether the plaintiff's confession was
true or false has no bearing on his section 1983 claims; on
those claims he must show - and only needs to show - that the
confession was procured via exertion of unconstitutionally
coercive means, regardless of its truth or falsity; (2) the
tactics condemned by Dr. Aaron are not pertinent to an
assessment of whether the defendants' conduct violated
constitutional standards, because various techniques that he
cites have been held not to rise to the level of coercion (at
least when considered piecemeal); (3) the postulated criteria
for evaluating confessions is not scientifically sound
because there is no scientifically verifiable means of
predicting false confessions, nor is there any way to test
purported factors in a controlled setting or to calculate any
error rate for the supposed predictors; (4) the questions
whether the confession was coerced - the ultimate legal issue
in the case - and whether the plaintiff confessed falsely,
are exclusively reserved for the jury's determination,
and expert testimony on those topics would merely invite them
to take the expert's view instead of considering the
evidence and the law and making up their own minds; and (5)
Aaron is unqualified to opine about anything concerning false
confessions because his background is in clinical and
forensic psychology, and he has never conducted any
experiments or published any studies on false confessions.
Once
again, it appears that the defendants' attempt to isolate
the integrated components of Dr. Aaron's report, and then
misconstrue those isolated elements that they do challenge.
For instance, Dr. Aaron does not actually assert anywhere in
his report that Sanford's confession was false. Instead,
he states: “Dispositional variables that have been
demonstrated to be associated with decreased reliability of
statements made in interrogation and thus increased risk of
false confession include developmental immaturity,
intellectual limitations, and the presence of mental health
problems.” Then he elaborates on “[t]he degree to
which each of these was present in this case, ” i.e.,
the extent to which the plaintiff displayed those factors
such as developmental immaturity, low intelligence, and
psychological dysfunctions such as ADHD at the time of his
arrest and interrogation. Therefore, the defendants'
principal challenge to the report concerns an issue on which
Dr. Aaron never expressed any expert view: whether the
plaintiff in fact falsely confessed to the murders. Moreover,
the recitation that the interrogation was
“stressful” and “frightening” ...