7th Circuit: Veteran officer deemed expert on drug jargon

By Patricia Manson pmanson@lawbulletinmedia.com

Posted January 12, 2021 11:49 AM

A veteran police officer was qualified to translate the coded text messages a suspect sent around the time of his arrest on drug and firearm charges, a federal appeals court ruled.In a nonprecedential order last week, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a judge’s decision to allow the officer to testify at Maurice D. Gardner’s trial about the purported meaning of the texts.Officer Cliff Simpson of the Evansville, Ind., Police Department took the stand as an expert witness on “the use and distribution of controlled …

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