United States v. Nimmer

43 M.J. 252, 1995 CAAF LEXIS 132, 1995 WL 708090
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Armed Forces
DecidedSeptember 29, 1995
DocketNo. 94-0768; CMR No. 922146
StatusPublished
Cited by17 cases

This text of 43 M.J. 252 (United States v. Nimmer) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Nimmer, 43 M.J. 252, 1995 CAAF LEXIS 132, 1995 WL 708090 (Ark. 1995).

Opinions

Opinion of the Court

WISS, Judge:

1. This is an appeal from a special court-martial conviction by officer members for wrongful use of cocaine.1 We agreed to consider whether the military judge abused his discretion when he excluded expert testimony regarding a negative hair analysis for presence of a cocaine metabolite, which was offered by the defense as tending to rebut the prosecution’s allegation of a one-time use of cocaine.2 See Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993); United [253]*253States v. Gipson, 24 MJ 246 (CMA 1987). Under the circumstances of this case, we conclude that a remand to the court-martial is necessary for relitigation of appellant’s proffer of the expert testimony in question. See United States v. Gates, 20 F.3d 1550 (11th Cir.1994); United States v. Rincon, 11 F.3d 922 (9th Cir.1993); United States v. Amador-Galvan, 9 F.3d 1414 (9th Cir.1993).

I

2. Appellant is a second class petty officer with over 7 years of excellent service. On January 27, 1992, as part of the routine incident to reporting to his new command at Recruit Training Center Great Lakes, Illinois, he submitted a urine sample for analysis. Three days later, the sample was reported positive for cocaine, though barely: The reading of 151 nanograms per milliliter (ng/ml) is only 1 ng/ml above the cut-off level for positive reports for the radioimmunoassay test (RIA) and only 51 ng/ml above the cut-off level for the gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS).

3. The ensuing trial pitted the urinalysis results and expert testimony explaining them against appellant’s sworn denial of ever knowingly using cocaine. The defense theory seemed two-fold: First, appellant had not used cocaine, and the urinalysis for some reason simply was wrong; second, if the urinalysis was correct, appellant’s ingestion had been unknowing.

4. The latter theory (although ultimately unsuccessful) was supported by testimony from the Government’s expert witness that the amount of cocaine necessary to produce a reading as low as appellant’s was so small that the person ingesting it might not have any noticeable effects. The former theory (also ultimately unsuccessful) was supported by appellant’s forthright assertion of never having used cocaine and by his record of lengthy good service. The issue before us arose from appellant’s efforts to offer additional evidence that he argues further would have tended to indicate non-use.

5. The evidence in question was the subject of a pretrial hearing under Article 39(a), Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 USC § 839(a). There, the defense sought admission of the results of a hair analysis. On February 8, a physician had removed from appellant’s head five “pencil-sized” dots of hair that subsequently had been tested at AccuTox Analytical Laboratories in Attalla, Alabama. Specifically, appellant sought to introduce testimony of Dr. Frederick P. Smith, the scientific director of that laboratory, who was offered and accepted “as an expert in hair testing for drug use through RIA and GC/MS.” Dr. Smith would state that “there was no detectable amount of benzoylecgonine [the cocaine metabolite] in Mr. Nimmer’s hair.” The inference that he would draw from that result is that, “[b]ased on the inch and a half length of the hair, there’s no evidence that Mr. Nimmer ... used cocaine over the past — the month — or three-month period covered by the inch and a half growth of that hair; that it shows no evidence of cocaine use.” Later, when asked to state again the inference he would draw from the absence of any detectable benzoylecgonine in appellant’s hair sample, Dr. Smith stated: “The reasonable inference is that Mr. Nimmer did not consume cocaine— any substantial amount of cocaine during the interval covered by that hair growth.”

6. After intense litigation of this matter, the military judge ultimately ruled against admission of appellant’s hair-analysis evidence. In doing so, he made the following findings of fact:

[F]ive, the AccuTox Laboratory is certified by NIDA [National Institute on Drug Abuse, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services] to perform federal urinalysis testing; six, the NIDA standards are stringent; seventh, the AccuTox Lab has no certification for hair analysis; eight, no certification of laboratories exists for hair analysis; nine, acceptable scientific procedure and forensic analysis of drugs requires a screening process and a separate and distinct confirmation process; ten, radioimmunoassay and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry are commonly utilized and generally accepted scientific techniques for this type of analysis; eleven, these techniques were em[254]*254ployed by AccuTox in analyzing the accused’s hair sample; twelve, the standard operating procedures and quality controls procedures utilized by AccuTox fall within the scheme of those generally accepted of those performing drug analysis; thirteen, testing hair for the presence of drugs is neither widely conducted nor widely accepted within the scientific community; fourteen, chronic cocaine use can be detected by hair analysis, and that fact is generally accepted within the scientific community; fifteen, how cocaine metabolites enter the hair and affix there is not known; sixteen, whether cocaine metabolites may be washed away by shampooing or washing them prior to urinalysis [sic] is not known; seventeen, two recent awaiting publication studies indicate that one-time use of drugs will result in metabolites presence in hair, although in those studies, the drugs, one of them was cocaine, were ingested by injection; eighteen, these studies indicate the presence of cocaine metabolite occurred as quickly as eight hours after ingestion in one case and over a month afterwards in another with the bulk of the sample occurring or showing the presence of that metabolite between those dates; nineteen, no other evidence exists that one-time use of hair analysis— one-time use of cocaine would show up in a hair analysis; twenty, hair analysis results have been admitted in a court only when other corroborating evidence was present; twenty-one, no uniformity in testing procedures presently exists within that portion of the scientific community engaged in hair analysis; twenty-two, the growth rate of hair is not uniform.

7. Immediately after entering these factual findings, the military judge offered the following legal reasoning and conclusions:

This court is required to balance the soundness and reliability of the process used, the evidence’s possibility to confuse the factfinder, and the connection of the evidence to a disputed factual issue in the cáse in determining whether to admit novel scientific evidence. I do not find the evidence in this case would confuse the court members____ Moreover, the evidence clearly goes to a disputed factual issue in the case, that is, did or did not the accused use cocaine as charged. Consequently, both these factors argue for admissibility.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
43 M.J. 252, 1995 CAAF LEXIS 132, 1995 WL 708090, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-nimmer-armfor-1995.