United States v. Noel

Personnel at a Virgin Islands airport smuggled cocaine onto flights bound for the U.S. mainland. Noel, a ground services supervisor at St. Thomas’s Airport, and three other employees were charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine and related possession offenses. The jury convicted Noel on all charges. The court sentenced him to 151 months’ imprisonment. More than a year later, Noel moved for a new trial on the ground of newly discovered evidence of juror misconduct. The district court denied the motion without a hearing. The Third Circuit affirmed, rejecting Noel’s arguments that the district court’s limitation on the cross-examination of his codefendants violated his rights under the Confrontation Clause; that the district court abused its discretion in denying his new trial motion without an evidentiary hearing; and that the evidence was insufficient to support the verdict. Even assuming the limitation “significantly inhibited” Noel’s exercise of his right to probe the codefendants’ “motivation in testifying,” it is not clear that the barred line of inquiry might have given the jury a “significantly different impression of credibility.” Before his trial began, Noel was aware that the court had impaneled a security officer working on a contract basis for the U.S. Marshals Service; he produced no evidence that a specific, nonspeculative impropriety occurred to justify a new trial. View "United States v. Noel" on Justia Law