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Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE Document 380 _ Filed 10/29/21 Page 28 of 54
Second, even if the decision of whether to charge the defendant in 2008 or 2019 had
some minimal relevance, it would be substantially outweighed by the dangers of confusing the
issues and misleading the jury. As courts in this Circuit have routinely held, introduction of
irrelevant decisions of whom and when to charge presents a substantial risk of confusing and
misleading the jury because a prosecutorial charging decision would tend to misdirect the jury’s
attention to a discretionary decision that is not connected to the ultimate quantum of evidence
that the Government adduces at trial. See, e.g., Borrero, 2013 WL 6020773, at *2 (holding that
“the limited amount of probative value that the . . . charging decisions add is substantially
outweighed by the risk of undue confusion and an unnecessary sideshow into [the]
circumstances”); Hill, 2014 WL 198813, at *2 (“[T]he reasons for the Kings County District
Attorney’s Office decision not to charge [the defendant] in 1997 are unknown and would cause
confusion of and speculation by the jury.”). That evidence invites the jury to abdicate its own
view of the fully developed evidentiary record in favor of speculation about charging decisions
by prosecutors at different times looking at different evidence and weighing different factors.
Those risks are particularly acute here. Any discussion of the Government’s prior
charging decisions would require extended trials within a trial concerning the bases for those
decisions. For instance, if the defense wishes to argue that the USAO-SDFL did not charge the
defendant in the Florida Investigations because those investigations did not generate inculpatory
evidence as to the defendant, it therefore puts at issue the non-prosecution agreement and the
circumstances of its creation. As the Court is aware, those circumstances were the subject of a
290 page report from the Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility. (See
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Document Details
| Filename | DOJ-OGR-00005421.jpg |
| File Size | 699.5 KB |
| OCR Confidence | 94.4% |
| Has Readable Text | Yes |
| Text Length | 2,042 characters |
| Indexed | 2026-02-03 16:59:42.023605 |