Thompson v. United States

SCHWELB, Associate Judge:

Almost half a century ago, long before Glasnost and Perestroika, a famous statesman with a gift for words described the Soviet Union as “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” 1 The future prime minister’s description of a then inscrutable nation would have been, and would remain today, an apt appraisal of the state of the law pertaining to the admission of proof of “other crimes.” When the writer of this opinion first studied evidence more than thirty years ago, he was warned by the authors of his casebook that

no part of the law of evidence is more…