The Supreme Court upheld a California woman’s drug trafficking conviction on Thursday that was based on an expert who testified that gangs rarely use “blind mules” to move drugs across the southern border, prompting a striking dissent from Justice Neil Gorsuch.
In a 6-3 decision that was not on the court’s usual ideological lines, the majority opinion in Diaz v. United States by Justice Clarence Thomas dismissed the argument that an expert witness for the prosecution had gone too far to describe defendant Delilah Guadalupe Diaz’s mindset when he said that most large-scale drug couriers were aware of what they were transporting.
Gorsuch, a Trump appointee known to break away from his Republican-appointed colleagues from time to time, dissented from the majority, arguing that the expert witness should have been inadmissible during Diaz’s trial.
He wrote that the “upshot” of this ruling leaves the government with “a new powerful tool in its pocket,” according to his dissent, which was joined by Democratic-appointed Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
“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 added.
