United States v. Briscoe
United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
896 F.2d 1476 (1990)
- Written by Angela Patrick, JD
Facts
Phyliss Briscoe and 13 others (traffickers) (defendants) were tried for conspiracy and other charges relating to trafficking heroin. At trial, phone records showing calls among the traffickers were admitted under Rule of Evidence 803(6) as business records. A custodian of records for the telephone company testified that the telephone company had a regular practice of assembling and maintaining computer records of each service subscriber’s phone calls, and that the records presented at trial were special printouts of this regularly maintained computer data. The custodian also testified that the computer used to assemble this call data checked itself for errors every 15 seconds. The traffickers then cross-examined the custodian. The traffickers were convicted and appealed. On appeal, the traffickers argued that the telephone records should have been excluded because there was no evidence that the telephone company’s computers were checked monthly for errors as the computers had been in an earlier case.
Rule of Law
Issue
Holding and Reasoning (Coffey, J.)
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