Hostetler v. Daniel P. Driscoll

Background

Daniel P. Driscoll asked the court to exclude, for all purposes in the litigation, the opinions and testimony of Mary Hostetler’s proposed expert witnesses, George Jouganatos and Erin Parker. Hostetler opposed excluding either expert. The court had previously decided the Army’s motion for summary judgment without needing to resolve expert admissibility.

This order addressed admissibility for a scheduled jury trial under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. That rule requires the court to ensure that expert testimony is relevant and rests on a reliable factual foundation. The court explained that expert opinions may not be based on unsupported assumptions or an unexplained gap between the evidence and the expert’s conclusions.

George Jouganatos

Jouganatos’s nine-page report included a one-page discussion of lost pay, which was central to Hostetler’s damages theory. His back-pay and other damages calculations assumed that Hostetler’s reclassification to a lower employment rank in October 2017 had not occurred. The court said the reclassification was undisputed and that Jouganatos offered no explanation or evidence supporting the assumption that Hostetler would otherwise have held the higher rank.

The court also noted that the 2017 reclassification was not itself a claim in the case. In an earlier ruling, the court had determined that Hostetler’s claims based on events before June 25, 2018, were stale under the applicable limitations period and rejected her continuing-violation theory. The court concluded that Jouganatos could not use expert testimony to bypass those rulings. It further stated that litigating the reclassification would create a trial within the trial and risk confusing or misleading the jury.

The court therefore held that Jouganatos’s opinions and testimony had an insurmountable gap between the evidence and the assumptions underlying his analysis. It excluded his opinions and testimony under Rule 702.

Erin Parker

Hostetler offered Parker as an expert in law-enforcement employment practices. The court said the record did not clearly establish the foundation for Parker’s qualifications. Her report emphasized experience involving use of force, prison and juvenile gangs, fugitive apprehension, and other subjects the court found irrelevant to this case. The report mentioned personnel investigations, but the record did not clearly show what those engagements involved or whether they qualified Parker in that area.

The court also had foundation concerns about Parker’s opinions that the Army mishandled Hostetler’s discrimination and retaliation complaints and related investigations. The court described much of the report as commentary on Army-affiliated witnesses’ deposition testimony mixed with conclusory statements. It also noted that Parker’s opinions did not appear to rely on federal policies or practices; the policies she cited were California documents that she agreed did not apply in the federal context.

Although the court had serious concerns about Parker’s status as a proper expert witness, it did not definitively conclude that exclusion was warranted on the current record. Before Parker may testify, the court will conduct a voir dire hearing outside the jury’s presence to examine her qualifications and the admissibility of her opinions. The court will decide whether to exclude her testimony after that hearing, and the parties were told to be prepared for it on the first day of trial.

Damages filing and disposition

The court directed Hostetler to file, by March 17, 2025, a statement explaining how she intended to prove damages at trial without Jouganatos’s testimony or opinions or those of another proposed expert. The order states that failure to meet that deadline would result in dismissal of the case under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(b).

The order excluded Jouganatos’s opinions and testimony, deferred the decision on Parker’s exclusion until trial, and imposed the damages-statement requirement. It did not decide the merits of the underlying claims in this order.