Carlos Barragan Leon v. United States
Did the district court's failure to make the required reliability finding pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 of the methodology and principles underlying the expert translator's testimony of the translation of text messages from Spanish into English when the words appeared 'out of order and scrambled' violate Daubert and Kumho Tire standards of expert testimony?
Mr. Carlos Barragan Leon was arrested at the border between Mexico and United States when border patrol agents found methamphetamine and fentanyl in the trunk of his car. Agents seized Mr. Leon’s cell phone and downloaded texts written in Spanish from WhatsApp. Because the texts were deleted, the words of the original texts appeared in a different order. The words in the text were “scrambled”. The government interpreter “rearranged” the words of the texts in an order that she “thought” the texter was thinking and writing . The district court allowed the interpreter to testify as to the English meaning of the Spanish words in the text that she “rearranged” as evidence against Mr. Leon . The Question Presented is: Did the district court’s failure to make the required reliability finding pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 702 of the methodology and principles underlying the expert translator’s testimony of the translation of the text messages from Spanish into English w hen the words appeared “out of order and scrambled” after the texts were downloaded from WhatsApp violate Daubert v. Merrill , 509 U.S. 579 (1993) and Kumho Tire v. Carmichael , 526 3 U.S. 127 (1999) when the expert translator “rearranged” the scrambled words in a manner she “thought” Mr. Leon was “thinking”, then translated her words into English and testified to the meaning of the words she rearranged?