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Notes -
Diaz's claim during trial was that she'd gone south of the border to meet a new boyfriend, and he'd let her borrow his car. If you believed this defense, the theory is less 'just hope' and more 'meet at predesignated point'. These sort of scams do exist, sometimes even at higher values, and indeed it's actually a bit of a struggle for courts to handle the border cases where the mule may have been willfully blind or where the arguments are more borderline.
((That said, for this specific case, Diaz seemed to have made up almost all of this, most of it not terribly credibly, including the boyfriend that supposedly loaded the car up to start with.))
So the need for an expert witness makes more sense than at first glance -- there's a lot about general drug trafficking approaches that aren't common knowledge or would be counterintuitive to common knowledge. And the question of what tactics drug traffickers use is the sort of thing that would be better considered under expert witness testimony, and could have been more appropriately discussed without a lot of nudge-and-winking about the defendant.
I'm still not a huge fan, but that's more because the scope of domain expertise is ugly. The fed here was testifying as an expert on gang trafficking of drugs, and reading through a search affidavit from an unrelated case gives a pretty lengthy and impressive personal record as part of investigatory task forces. It's... less compelling as a matter of his expertise on the full breadth of drug trafficking tactics, especially for the sort of broad statistical analysis he's giving here.
((Though the rule applies both ways, at least in this specific case, as Jackson points out; Diaz's defense brought in a car mechanic who was allow to testify about how most people wouldn't notice the modifications to the car here. But I'm skeptical that the average decision is fully evenhanded, and Jackson's asides about other defenses leave me a little unsated given how weak the protections against dueling experts are.))
((But in turn, that wasn't the question raised before the court, here.))
I remember hearing about this case (this was like 20 years ago; I may be wrong on a couple of details) where an Australian couple "won" a "free getaway" to Indonesia with suitcases provided. They noticed that the suitcases were significantly heavier when provided for the return trip than they'd been on the outgoing trip, and alerted the local police who pulled them apart and indeed found they were full of drugs. Thankfully, the couple didn't end up getting shot anyway, though IIRC the police thought about it.
Yeah, it's been a long-standing issue, sometimes resulting in serious convictions where courts believed that the 'mule' should have been more suspicious.
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