United States v. Cornelius Peoples, United States of America v. Xavier Lightfoot

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that the district court erred in admitting testimony under Rule 701 where an officer “lacked firsthand knowledge of the matters about which she testified [because h]er opinions were based on her investigation after the fact, not on her perception of the facts”
• holding the Rule 701 error was not harmless where the jury may have found the testimony of a co-conspirator “inadequate to support a guilty verdict beyond a reasonable doubt had it not been buttressed by [the agent’s] supporting information and opinions.”
• remanding for a new trial because the Government’s expert “was allowed to emboss apparently neutral conversations . . . with the imprimatur of the government’s case”
• district court has wide discretion to require use of numbers for identification in any case
• “Before the interception of a conversation can be found to constitute an ‘oral communication’ under the federal wiretap law, . . . the individuals involved must show they had a reasonable expectation of privacy in that conversation.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).