United States v. Gaytan, No. 09-3601 (7th Cir. 2011)
Annotate this CaseDefendant sold crack to a confidential informant; the FBI captured the negotiations and transactions, which occurred in defendant's car, on audio recordings. Agents also conducted visual and video surveillance of the controlled buys, but because of gaps, they did not actually see and the video recordings do not show money and drugs changing hands. The informant-buyer was not a witness at trial. Defendant was convicted under 21 U.S.C. 841(a)(1) and sentenced to concurrent terms of 125 months in prison. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. The evidence was easily sufficient to sustain the convictions. There was no Confrontation Clause violation; two challenged recorded statements involving the buyer were offered for context, not for their truth. The FBI agents' testimony about the recordings was not unfairly prejudicial. here. Even if a comment by one of the agents about "two big ones" was improper expert opinion, the admission of this small bit of testimony did not qualify as plain error.
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