Today, the U.S. District Court for the District of Kansas dismissed the government’s denaturalization case against our client. You can read the full order here:
U.S. v. Malik – Order Denying Denaturalization
Background
The government filed the case in 2015, claiming our client had never legally divorced in Pakistan—despite having a divorce decree and official records. After years of litigation, including:
11 depositions (4 from witnesses in Pakistan)
2 investigations into the divorce decree
Discovery sanctions against the government for withholding evidence
The case went to a two-day bench trial in October 2018.
Why the Court Dismissed the Case
The court found the government failed to prove its allegations. Specifically:
The government’s two “expert” witnesses were not credible:
The first lacked relevant experience, ignored key facts, and didn’t explain his conclusions.
The second didn’t speak Urdu, didn’t know Pakistani law, and gave inconsistent testimony.
The alleged false statements weren’t material to the client’s eligibility for naturalization.
As a result, the court dismissed the suit. Our client remains a U.S. citizen.
Breaking it Down
Today the court concluded the government hadn’t met its burden to prove what it had alleged in its Complaint: that the defendant hadn’t gotten divorced in Pakistan. In doing so, the court noted two “expert” witnesses the government brought to Kansas to testify that the documents were forgeries were unpersuasive and that neither was actually an expert.
The court described the first expert’s testimony “about the age and authenticity” of the divorce documents to be “unpersuasive” because he “did not have extensive experience at the time he evaluated the documents and did not offer sufficient reasoning for his conclusions” and, more importantly, “did not consider key evidence in reaching his conclusions, such as how and where the documents were stored.”
Regarding the second “expert” who claimed to have determined certain re-marriage documents to be forged, the court described his testimony as “not persuasive on any relevant matters” and noted he “did not have substantial experience at the time he worked in Pakistan,” and did not “speak or read Urdu,” the language all the documents were written in.
And the court noted he was unfamiliar with Pakistani law even though that’s largely what his testimony was about. The court concluded his testimony was inconsistent and declined to conclude that the documents were forged.
Finally, the court concluded that statements the government characterized as false hadn’t been “material” to the defendant’s naturalization eligibility. Because that was the basis for denaturalizing him, the court dismissed the suit.
Our client remains a U.S. citizen.
I’m curious as to why the court admitted the testimony of the two “experts” but gave it little credibility. They appear to have been unqualified under Daubert. The court explicitly characterizes them as “lay” witnesses rather than expert witnesses, which would seem to indicate that it rejected them as experts entitled to give opinion testimony. Why was their testimony admissible at all?
I think the answer is that traditionally everything comes in when the case is tried to the bench (rather than the jury) and then the judge is presumed to disregard the information that would be considered in admissible or prejudicial (this is discussed in Gentile v. State Bar, 501 U.S. 1030, 1077 (1991)). I did file Daubert motions for both, and the court denied those motions and declined to exclude the testimony entirely. But the court also ultimately concluded they weren’t really experts and only considered them as lay witnesses (and cited the reasons we had listed in the Daubert motions). I would rather they had been excluded entirely – their testimony took up half of the trial time and was expensive to prepare for (in terms of time, energy, and money). However, ultimately the risk of permitting testimony from an unqualified expert is most pronounced with juries, because the jury may believe the specious opinions of the unqualified expert. Since this was a bench trial and the judge was presumed to be able to disregard prejudicial testimony, there wasn’t really any harm in allowing them to testify.