USA v. Chambers et al

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
- against –
AKEEM CHAMBERS,
also known as “Luca,” 	ORDER
JERELL SHAW, 	23-CR-157 (JMA)
also known as “Rells Fargo”
and “Rells,” and
JONATHAN VAZQUEZ,
also known as “Chulo”
and “Clutch.”
Defendants.
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AZRACK, United States District Judge:
The Court is permitting Ziegler to testify as an expert. The Court expects that Zeigler will
provide an exhaustive foundation before providing his opinions. Given the time constraints placed
on the Court by Defendants’ last-minute filings concerning this expert, I will explain my rationale
more fully in a separate order. 	While the Court is denying Defendants’ motion to exclude this
testimony, the Court will require the expert testimony to conform to the limitations set out in the
Graham, which directed that the expert’s testimony conform to the DOJ’s Uniform Language for
Testimony of Reports for the Forensic Firearms/Toolmarks Discipline (“ULTR”). 	See United
States v. Graham, No. 23-CR-00006, 2024 WL 688256 (W.D. Va. Feb. 20, 2024)
There is one point addressed in Defendants’ motion that the court will briefly address now.
Defendants point, on page 5 of their motion, to a study entitled Cognitive Biases in the
Peer Review of Bullet and Cartridge Case Comparison Casework: A field study (hereinafter, the
“Cognitive Biases Study”)) Defendants assert that this study is important because Zeigler and Fox
were both directed to specific casings by the NIBIN automated correlation system, which can result
in contextual bias. 	The Court has reviewed, not just the abstract of this study cited by the
FILED
CLERK
U.S. DISTRICT COURT
EASTERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
LONG ISLAND OFFICE
2:37 pm, Feb 18, 2026
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defendants, but the complete underlying article. 	This study does not render the Government’s
experts deficient under Rule 702. 	While this study found increased disagreement in the blind
comparisons in the study, the article makes clear that these disagreements concerned the
examiners’ views on the “evidential strength” of their conclusions based on a scale involving six
different options ranging from “Approximately equally probable” to “extremely more probable.”
(Cognitive Biases Study at 1, 12, 21–22.) The article, however, explains:
We emphasize that these disagreements only concerned the judged evidential
strength and not the source judgments themselves. The examiners did not disagree
on whether the evidence supported a same-source or different-source conclusion,
for 	which 	examiners 	did 	not 	provide 	contradicting 	judgments. 	Providing
judgments on the degree of support in the form of a likelihood ratio is fairly new.
The results of this study show that there was between-subject variability in these
judgments. On average the proposed conclusions of the first and second examiner
differed by one step on the conclusion scale (Table 1).
Id. at 12 (emphasis added).
This article also explains that studies in this field “typically focus on categorical
conclusions (same-source, different-source or inconclusive judgments) and not on the judged
evidential strength” and that “[l]ooking at this result solely in the context of this study, we believe
that this is a fairly high degree of reliability of judgments.” 	Id. at 12.
This article might provide fodder for cross-examination concerning contextual bias, but it
does not render the Government’s expert opinions deficient under Rule 702.
SO ORDERED.
Dated: February 18, 2026
Central Islip, New York 	/s/ 	(JMA)
JOAN M. AZRACK
UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
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