United States v. James Glenn, A/K/A James M. Green

SPOTTSWOOD W. ROBINSON, III, Circuit Judge,

dissenting:

My colleagues, I believe, have supplanted the District Judge’s evidentiary ruling with the ruling they would have made had they been acting in his stead. That, in my view, is neither our function nor our prerogative. I must, therefore, respectfully dissent.

I

Two wholesome precepts weigh heavily on an appellate court called upon to review evidentiary rulings by a trial court. The first is that the Anglo-American law of evidence vests exclusively in the trial judge the task of establishing the admissibility, or inadmis*196sibility of evidence in…