Nnebe v. Daus

Background

The defendants filed a motion in limine, meaning a request to limit evidence before trial, seeking to prevent plaintiffs’ experts Michael Rempel and Melissa S. Ader from testifying under Federal Rule of Evidence 702. The court stated that expert testimony is admissible only when the witness is qualified, the testimony will help the jury decide a disputed fact, the opinion rests on sufficient facts or data, and the expert used reliable methods and applied them reliably to the case.

The upcoming trial concerns twenty individual taxi drivers. Among other issues, the jury will consider whether each driver would have requested a hearing before the New York Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings and whether an administrative law judge would have found that driver was not a danger and reinstated the driver’s license.

Michael Rempel’s Proposed Testimony

Rempel, a criminologist and university professor, had researched and developed risk-assessment tools generally used in bail and parole proceedings. He planned to testify that taxi drivers as a group pose an “overwhelmingly low risk” of reoffending after arrest. His report relied on studies concerning the relationship between reoffending and factors such as the severity of the charge, recent convictions, age, and employment.

The court held that Rempel’s opinion would not help the jury decide whether any of the twenty individual drivers would have prevailed at an administrative hearing. The plaintiffs did not show that administrative law judges routinely use risk-assessment tools or similar statistical factors when deciding whether to reinstate licenses. The court also rejected Rempel’s assertion that increased driver success rates showed that administrative decisions were converging with empirical data, because he offered no evidence that the judges relied on such data.

The court further found that Rempel’s review of only the twenty most recent administrative decisions was too small and potentially unrepresentative to provide sufficient data. His analysis also concerned taxi drivers generally rather than drivers similarly situated to the twenty plaintiffs, such as drivers facing similar charges or having comparable criminal histories. The court additionally stated that it would exclude the statistics under Rule 403 because they could mislead the jury into assuming that an individual driver was unlikely to reoffend merely because taxi drivers as a group were statistically unlikely to do so.

Melissa S. Ader’s Proposed Testimony

Ader was an attorney at an organization that had represented eighteen drivers in administrative reinstatement proceedings. She had personally represented seven drivers and supervised other attorneys representing six more. She offered opinions about the harm of suspensions to taxi drivers, how administrative law judges treated arrests, the reliability of proceedings from 2020 through 2023, and whether criminal defense lawyers advised drivers to skip administrative hearings because of self-incrimination concerns.

The court found that Ader was not qualified to offer opinions about demographics and socioeconomic backgrounds because she was not a sociologist. It also found that her opinions about administrative proceedings were not based on sufficient facts or data or reliable methods. Ader had personally appeared in, or supervised others in, only thirteen proceedings, which the court viewed as a very small portion of the hundreds of proceedings occurring since the suspension protocols changed in 2019. She did not show that those proceedings represented the twenty drivers in this case.

The court also found that Ader did not explain how she reached her conclusions. Her report offered conclusions about how administrative law judges treated arrests, the reliability of the 2020-to-2023 proceedings, and lawyers’ advice without identifying the evidence or methodology supporting them. The court noted that Ader did not claim to be a criminal defense lawyer.

Ruling

The court granted defendants’ motion in limine to preclude Rempel and Ader from testifying as expert witnesses. This was an evidentiary ruling about whether the proposed expert testimony satisfied Rule 702; the opinion did not decide the underlying claims in the case.