United States v. Scop
United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
846 F.2d 135 (2d Cir. 1988)
Scop and others (defendants) were charged with fraud in an alleged scheme to inflate the price of a company's stock, and the prosecution's key witness, SEC investigator Stanley Whitten, testified that certain individuals participated in a manipulative and fraudulent scheme, repeatedly using language taken directly from the fraud statute, and admitted on cross-examination that his testimony partly rested on a positive assessment of the credibility of the prosecution's other witnesses. The trial court convicted the defendants based partly on this testimony, and they appealed its admission.
Whether an expert witness's testimony that improperly tracks the exact language of the charged criminal statute, and is partly based on the witness's own assessment of other witnesses' credibility, is admissible as opinion testimony on an ultimate issue of fact.