Supreme Court rules in government’s favor in San Diego ‘blind mule’ drug courier case

The U.S. Supreme Court issued a split opinion Thursday in a case originating out of San Diego, ruling that expert witnesses can continue to tell jurors that most drug couriers caught at the U.S.-Mexico border know they’re transporting drugs, even when the defendants argue they were unwitting “blind mules.

San Diego defense attorney Danielle Iredale, who first represented Diaz and raised the issue at trial, predicted in March after thethat the decision would involve “strange bedfellows” and be close. “I don’t think the split is necessarily going to be along the typical ideological lines,” Iredale predicted after attending the oral arguments in person.

The government has acknowledged that Mexican drug-smuggling groups sometimes use the vehicles of unwitting victims — such as students or workers who cross the border at routine and predictable times — but maintains that such cases are rare.

The rule at the heart of the case states in part that “an expert witness must not state an opinion” about a defendant’s state of mind. Congress amended the rule to its current form through the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984 in response to the acquittal of President Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr. A jury found Hinckley not guilty by reason of insanity after hearing conflicting testimony about whether he met the legal standard for insanity.

Wrote Gorsuch: “Prosecutors can now put an expert on the stand — someone who apparently has the convenient ability to read minds — and let him hold forth on what ‘most’ people like the defendant think when they commit a legally proscribed act. Then, the government need do no more than urge the jury to find that the defendant is like ‘most’ people and convict.

Gorsuch went on to write that “the problem of junk science in the courtroom is real and well documented … And perhaps no ‘science’ is more junky than mental telepathy.”

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