United States v. Cordoba (Cordoba III)

A federal jury convicted Frank Cordoba (defendant) of possession of cocaine with intent to distribute it. Cordoba was arrested while driving a van that carried 300 kilograms of cocaine. Cordoba attempted to introduce polygraph-examination results to support his defense that he did not know the van contained cocaine. The district court refused to admit Cordoba’s proffered evidence of polygraph-examination results, reasoning that precedent of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit made polygraph evidence per se inadmissible. Cordoba appealed, and the Ninth Circuit reversed Cordoba’s conviction and remanded Cordoba’s case to the district court to apply the standard developed in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993). The district court held a two-day evidentiary hearing before rejecting Cordoba’s polygraph on two legal grounds. First, the district court held that polygraph-testing evidence generally did not meet the Daubert standard. Polygraph examinations had been subjected to field and laboratory testing, and many articles about polygraph examinations had been published in peer-reviewed journals. But there was no known error rate for real-life polygraph testing outside of controlled environments, and polygraph testing was not generally accepted in the relevant scientific community, and scientists’ opinions of polygraph testing appeared to be severely polarized. Cordoba’s proffered expert witness, Dr. Raskin, opined that despite irregularities with Cordoba’s polygraph examination, Cordoba’s polygraph examination complied with the polygraph industry’s standards, and its results were sufficiently reliable to be admitted at trial. The district court found that several sets of conflicting standards existed and that Raskin’s approval of Cordoba’s obviously defective test showed that insufficient standards governed polygraph examinations. Second, the district court concluded that defects in Cordoba’s particular test undermined its relevance, and thus the potential prejudice of Cordoba’s polygraph examination outweighed its probative value. The district court reinstated Cordoba’s conviction, and Cordoba again appealed.