Faltz v. United States

Notice: This opinion is subject to formal revision before publication in the Atlantic and Maryland Reporters. Users are requested to notify the Clerk of the Court of any formal errors so that corrections may be made before the bound volumes go to press. DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA COURT OF APPEALS No. 25-CO-0361 ANTHONY FALTZ, APPELLANT, V. UNITED STATES, APPELLEE. Appeal from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia (2006-CF1-004490) (Erik P. Christian, Judge) (Argued May 14, 2026 Decided September 24, 2026) James Millikan, with whom Leslie W. Kostyshak, Matthew J. Revis, and Katie Tanzola were on the briefs, for appellant. David P. Saybolt, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Jeanine Ferris Pirro, United States Attorney, and Chrisellen R. Kolb, Nicholas P. Coleman, and Kacie Weston, Assistant United States Attorneys, were on the brief, for appellee. Before DEAHL, HOWARD, and SHANKER, Associate Judges. SHANKER, Associate Judge: For over a decade, appellant Anthony Faltz has sought a judicial determination that he is actually innocent of the crime to which he pled guilty in 2006: recklessly smashing a stolen Ford Crown Victoria into the side of a Nissan Altima, killing its occupants, and thereby committing involuntary  2 manslaughter. While Mr. Faltz was unquestionably in the Ford when the crash occurred, police eyewitness accounts of the accident initially identified a different vehicle occupant, Dorrell Ingram, as the driver. The investigation’s focus shifted— and Mr. Faltz pled guilty—only after Mr. Faltz’s DNA was found in the center of the Ford’s driver’s-side airbag. Years later, however, advances in forensic DNA identification techniques uncovered a second DNA sample from Dorrell Ingram in a different location on that same airbag, prompting Mr. Faltz to file a petition under D.C.’s Innocence Protection Act (IPA), D.C. Code § 22-4135. We remanded the trial court’s prior denial of Mr. Faltz’s IPA petition in Faltz v. United States (Faltz I), 318 A.3d 338 (D.C. 2024), and on remand the trial court again denied the petition. In this second appeal, Mr. Faltz argues that the trial court improperly admitted the government’s expert testimony and made a number of legal and factual errors when it determined that he had not established his actual innocence by a preponderance of the evidence. He also asks that we reassign this case on remand. In light of our deferential standard of review of the trial court’s gatekeeping function for expert testimony, we conclude that the trial court acted within its discretion in admitting that testimony and we affirm that decision. But because the trial court improperly exercised its discretion by ignoring exculpatory evidence,  3 failing to probe the weaknesses in the expert testimony it admitted, and improperly assessing Mr. Faltz’s own testimony, we vacate the trial court’s denial of Mr. Faltz’s IPA petition and remand again. We also direct that the case be reassigned to a different judge on remand. I. Background This appeal arises out of Mr. Faltz’s 2006 convictions, following a guilty plea, for involuntary manslaughter and his subsequent efforts for post-conviction relief. We do not repeat the full factual and procedural background of this case as set forth in Faltz I. Instead, we highlight as much of the earlier background as is necessary to explain the context for this decision. A. The Crash and the Guilty Plea On February 19, 2002, a stolen Ford Crown Victoria containing Mr. Faltz and twin brothers Dorrell and Darryl Ingram crashed into a Nissan Maxima as the three men fled the police, killing the two people inside the Nissan. See Faltz I, 318 A.3d at 341. Conflicting accounts as to who was driving the Ford at the time of the accident form the factual and legal core of this case. Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Officers Gregory Phifer and Herman Hodges witnessed the accident from one or two blocks away and reached the vehicle  4 within seconds of the crash. Id. at 342. Both officers testified that they saw the driver emerge from the driver’s seat and run into a nearby wooded area. Id. The officers eventually arrested the man, whom they later identified as Dorrell Ingram. Id. MPD officers also identified the rear passenger as Mr. Faltz and the front passenger as Darryl Ingram. Id. In written reports, an MPD detective noted that Dorrell Ingram was identified as the driver “[d]ue to the overwhelming available physical evidence and witness observations.” Id. After initially charging Dorrell Ingram with second-degree murder as the driver of the car, the government changed tack once DNA testing of a sample recovered from the center of the driver’s side airbag excluded Dorrell Ingram as a DNA contributor and showed that Mr. Faltz’s DNA could not be excluded as a match. Id. The FBI’s lab report from that time also stated that the sample “contained DNA from more than one individual.” Id. Because this 2003 DNA testing appeared to point to Mr. Faltz as the driver of the car, Mr. Faltz was charged with second- degree murder and all charges against the Ingram brothers were dropped. Id. Mr. Faltz pled guilty to two counts of involuntary manslaughter after his court-appointed attorney, Ferris Bond, told him that his DNA was “all over the airbag” and that he would likely receive a maximum fifteen-year sentence if he took the deal. Id. At the plea hearing, neither the government nor Mr. Faltz expressly  5 stated that he was the driver of the Ford; the government’s proffer of facts stated only, as relevant here, that officers saw Mr. Faltz coming out of the car’s “rear door” but that it was later discovered that “DNA found on the driver’s air bag . . . was a match to Mr. Faltz’s DNA profile,” and Mr. Faltz agreed that those facts were true. After his plea and before his sentencing, Mr. Faltz provided a statement to the writer of his Presentence Report (PSR) maintaining that he was not the driver. Id. at 343. When the writer asked why he pled guilty if he was not the driver, Mr. Faltz responded, “I didn’t think it was a winnable case.” Id. Mr. Faltz also submitted a letter to the court in which he expressed regret at having “been the cause of someone losing their li[fe].” The trial court sentenced Mr. Faltz to sixteen years on each count of involuntary manslaughter, to run consecutively, for a total of thirty-two years of incarceration. Id. B. Innocence Protection Act Proceedings In April 2015, Mr. Faltz moved to have the DNA evidence retested pursuant to the IPA after seeing a Washington Post article calling into question DNA results from the District of Columbia’s crime lab. Id. In June 2016, fourteen years after the original FBI testing of the DNA on the airbag, a private forensics laboratory—Bode Cellmark—retested the DNA from the Ford’s driver’s-side airbag. Id. at 344. Bode’s  6 report confirmed that Mr. Faltz’s DNA was on the center of the airbag, but it identified a second sample on the right edge of the airbag with DNA profiles of at least two people. Id. Due to the poor quality of the second sample, however, Bode did not interpret the results such that it could identify the specific contributors to the DNA sample. Id. Mr. Faltz then approached an expert, Dr. Norah Rudin, to interpret the second DNA sample using a previously unavailable method called “probabilistic genotyping,” which assigns likelihoods to DNA profiles rather than a binary “match/no match” approach. Id. Dr. Rudin determined that evidence supporting the presence of Dorrell Ingram’s DNA in the second sample from the edge of the airbag was “about 100 times stronger” than that of Mr. Faltz. Id. With this new evidence, Mr. Faltz pursued an IPA claim alongside claims for ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) under D.C. Code § 23-110 against both his trial counsel and his postconviction counsel. Id. At a 2022 hearing on the IPA and IAC claims, Mr. Faltz testified that he had told Mr. Bond that he was not the driver and thus wanted to go to trial. Id. at 342. Mr. Faltz stated that he was in the backseat “probably behind the driver or sitting in the middle” and that Dorrell Ingram was driving the Ford. Id. Mr. Faltz also testified that he had been leaning slightly forward during the chase, was thrown forward during the collision, and did not know whether  7 he hit the driver’s-side airbag. Id. He stated that after the crash he attempted to get out of the car through the right rear passenger door but an injury to his right hip prevented him from getting far. Id. Mr. Faltz also testified that he pled guilty because he had been told that his DNA was all over the airbag, that the Ingram brothers were planning to testify that he was the driver, and that he would likely receive a fifteen-year sentence, and he added that he would not have pled guilty if he had known that Dorrell Ingram’s DNA was also present on the airbag. Id. at 342, 344. He stated that Mr. Bond did not explain involuntary manslaughter to him or tell him that he had to be the driver to be found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and that he never told Mr. Bond that he was the driver. In response to the trial court’s question why Mr. Faltz would have pled guilty to manslaughter if he was just a passenger, Mr. Faltz’s attorney said that Mr. Faltz understood that he was pleading guilty to manslaughter rather than murder because he was a passenger, and that he was never identified as the driver during the plea colloquy. The court again asked why Mr. Faltz would have pled guilty to having killed two people if he knew he was not the driver, to which counsel responded that Mr. Faltz believed that he was pleading guilty based on his involvement in the conduct that killed two people. The trial court then expressed doubt that someone would plead guilty to a crime—even shoplifting of bubble gum—if they had not committed the crime. Finally, the court asked why Mr. Faltz did not deny being the  8 driver of the car when the government asserted as much at sentencing; Mr. Faltz’s counsel explained that Mr. Faltz told the PSR writer that he was not the driver and that at the point of sentencing he did not want to undo the plea and go to trial on a murder charge with Mr. Bond representing him. Mr. Faltz and the government presented the testimony and reports of several expert witnesses at the 2022 hearing. Id. at 344-45. First, Mr. Faltz’s expert Dr. Rudin testified about her interpretation of the DNA sample using probabilistic genotyping. Id. at 344. The government presented its own DNA expert, Dr. Bruce Budowle, who critiqued Dr. Rudin’s methodology for crediting false “peaks” in the sample. Id. Nevertheless, Dr. Budowle agreed that Dorrell Ingram was a likely contributor, along with Mr. Faltz, to the sample on the edge of the airbag. Id. Second, on the issue of accident reconstruction, Mr. Faltz presented expert C. Gregory Russell, and the government presented two expert witnesses, Michael Miller and Brian Chase. Id. The government’s experts testified that, based on their reconstruction of the manner in which the crash occurred, the center of the Ford’s airbag would have collided directly with the driver’s facial area, which suggested that the presence of Mr. Faltz’s DNA on the center of the airbag showed that he was the driver. Id. at 344-45. Mr. Faltz’s expert testified that the crash instead flung the Ford’s occupants diagonally and to the left, which would have caused the driver to  9 miss the center of the airbag and could have caused a backseat passenger (like Mr. Faltz) to make contact with the center of the airbag. Id. at 345. The trial court denied Mr. Faltz’s IAC and IPA claims. See id. C. Faltz I Appeal On appeal, we affirmed the trial court’s disposition of Mr. Faltz’s IAC claims, Faltz I, 318 A.3d at 345-47, but we remanded the IPA ruling, id. at 347-50. We explained that “the nexus between evidence of Mr. Faltz’s innocence—including his guilty plea—and the admitted expert testimony” required us to “consider both issues together in reviewing the trial court’s assessment.” Id. at 347. We determined that the trial court committed reversible error when it did not “substantively address the admissibility of the experts’ testimony” under Federal Rule of Evidence 702 as required by our en banc decision in Motorola Inc. v. Murray, 147 A.3d 751 (D.C. 2016) (en banc), and that the court “failed to grapple with the full set of evidence presented” at the IPA hearings. Faltz I, 318 A.3d at 348-49. We therefore remanded for the trial court to “conduct an analysis of the admissibility of the government’s proffered expert testimony under [Motorola], and . . . to grapple with the full set of evidence that Mr. Faltz presented of his innocence.” Id. at 347, 350.  10 D. Remand On remand, the trial court once again found the accident reconstruction expert evidence of both Mr. Chase and Mr. Miller admissible under Rule 702. Then, after crediting that evidence, the court denied Mr. Faltz’s IPA petition. It concluded that Mr. Faltz must have been the driver of the Ford at the time of the crash because “the driver could not miss the airbag and the driver’s DNA is located on the center of the airbag.” Mr. Faltz timely appealed. He challenges both the trial court’s admission of the government’s expert accident reconstruction evidence and the court’s ultimate determination that he did not establish his actual innocence by a preponderance of the evidence.  11 II. Analysis A. Admissibility of the Government’s Expert Testimony1 Under Rule 702 and Motorola 1. Legal Framework and Standard of Review In deciding the admissibility of expert testimony, a court must consider whether: (a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue; (b) the testimony is based on sufficient facts or data; (c) the testimony is the product of reliable principles and methods; and (d) the expert has reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case. Faltz I, 318 A.3d at 348 (quoting Motorola, 147 A.3d at 756); see Fed. R. Evid. 702. “The Rule . . . elevates the trial judge’s role as gatekeeper; it essentially provides that when a party proffers expert scientific testimony, the trial court must 1 Mr. Miller and Mr. Chase both formally adopted their written reports as part of their oral testimony during the 2022 hearing. Except where we note otherwise, we use “testimony” to refer to the expert evidence offered by Mr. Miller and Mr. Chase, which includes both their in-court statements and the written expert reports they adopted as part of their testimony.  12 make a preliminary assessment of whether the reasoning or methodology underlying the testimony is scientifically valid.” Lewis v. United States, 263 A.3d 1049, 1059 (D.C. 2021) (citation modified). “Rule 702 expressly requires the trial court to determine whether an expert reliably applied principles and methods to the case at hand . . . .” Faltz I, 318 A.3d at 348 (citation modified). But this “more refined gatekeeping role” does not permit a trial judge to “displace the normal tools of the adversary system.” Motorola, 147 A.3d at 754. Instead, “[v]igorous cross- examination, presentation of contrary evidence, and careful instruction on the burden of proof are the traditional and appropriate means of attacking shaky but admissible evidence.” Id. (quoting Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharms., Inc., 509 U.S. 579, 596 (1993)). “Both the preliminary reliability determination and the manner in which it is made are committed to the trial judge’s discretion, reviewable for abuse.” Lewis, 263 A.3d at 1059. “In reviewing for abuse of discretion, we must determine whether the decision maker failed to consider a relevant factor, whether the decision maker relied upon an improper factor, and whether the reasons given reasonably support the conclusion.” Bishop v. United States, 310 A.3d 629, 641 (D.C. 2024) (citation modified). In addition, the trial court must make “an informed choice . . . drawn from a firm factual foundation.” Brooks v. United States, 993 A.2d 1090, 1093 (D.C. 2010) (citation modified). Although this standard is deferential, “there is an  13 important tradeoff for giving the trial court such latitude: that court must take no shortcuts; it must exercise its discretion with reference to [a]ll the necessary criteria.” Willis v. United States, 353 A.3d 874, 882 (D.C. 2026) (quoting Ibn-Tamas v. United States, 407 A.2d 626, 635 (D.C. 1979)). Consequently, we “must not affirm a ruling premised on trial court discretion unless the record clearly manifests either (1) that the trial court has ruled on each essential criterion, or (2) that the trial court, as a matter of law, had but one option.” Id. 2. Additional Background Mr. Miller responded to the crash in his then-role as an MPD officer in the Major Crash Investigations Unit. See Faltz I, 318 A.3d at 344. Although he did not perform an accident reconstruction on the night of the collision, he did note his observations of the crash and the vehicles and made a field sketch of the accident scene. Id. at 344-45. In 2006, four years after the crash, Mr. Miller returned to the scene to map the accident and create a report documenting the car’s moment-by- moment movements before, during, and after the crash. Id. at 345. His report stated, and he later testified, that the Ford began rotating only after the airbags had fully inflated, indicating that the crash impact caused the driver to hit the airbag head-on. Id.  14 Mr. Chase’s testimony relied on Mr. Miller’s conclusions regarding how the crash took place. He testified that the Ford’s airbag would have fully deployed 40 milliseconds after impact, before any rotation occurred, meaning that the driver could not have missed the center of the airbag—where Mr. Faltz’s DNA was found. Id. The trial court found that Mr. Miller’s testimony was based on sufficient facts or data despite the four-year gap between the crash and the report’s drafting because “Mr. Miller referred to data collected the night of the crash including the forensic paint, gauge and tire markings, field sketch, pictures, weights of the vehicles and diagrams” and because “Mr. Miller testified that he did estimate speed and that estimate was based on data collected the night of the crash.” The trial court found that the testimony was the product of reliable principles and methods because Mr. Miller examined the scene the night of the crash and took various measurements; took 360-degree photos of the impounded vehicles; and used this data, along with vehicle diagrams, to estimate the speed of Mr. Faltz’s vehicle. Finally, the trial court concluded that Mr. Miller reliably applied the principles and methods to the facts of the case because he used his conclusions about the vehicle’s speed, along with his knowledge of the size and deployment speed of the car’s airbags, to conclude that the airbags would have fully deployed before the vehicle started to rotate and that the driver of the vehicle would therefore have made contact with the airbag.  15 The trial court then explained that “the Miller and Chase reports rise and fall with the reliability of the Miller report,” and it concluded that because Mr. Miller’s testimony was based on sufficient facts or data, Mr. Chase’s was as well. It concluded that Mr. Chase’s testimony was the product of reliable principles and methods because his methods included “assessment of [ ] known physical evidence associated with the sequence of crash events”; “accepted scientific crash reconstruction and physical principles inclusive of occupant kinematics”; “documented physical injuries sustained by defendant Anthony Faltz during the crash events”; and “automotive technology design and operation characteristics” of the vehicle’s airbag, along with Mr. Chase’s presence during the examination of the airbags. Finally, it concluded that Mr. Chase’s opinion—that “for a severe frontal impact, as in this case, the driver cannot miss contact with the airbag”—was the result of a reliable application of these principles and methods to the facts of Mr. Faltz’s case. 3. Discussion Mr. Faltz argues that the testimony of the government’s accident- reconstruction experts was inadmissible because it was not based on sufficient data and was the product of unreliable principles. See Fed. R. Evid. 702(b), (c). The government asserts that the trial court properly exercised its discretion in admitting  16 the expert testimony and that Mr. Faltz’s arguments go to weight, not admissibility. Applying our deferential standard of review to the trial court’s gatekeeper function under Rule 702 and Motorola, we agree with the government. a. Mr. Miller’s Evidence Mr. Faltz primarily argues that Mr. Miller’s testimony was “based on unreliable data” because it was imprecise and “reflected only estimates and educated guesswork.” He focuses on the data and information that Mr. Miller did not have: he did not collect certain physical evidence on the night of the crash, his field sketches were not drawn to scale, he did not attempt to forensically map the scene (or create any kind of accident reconstruction) until years later, and he admitted on the stand that findings related to vehicle speed and angle were estimates and not precise calculations. Mr. Faltz further contends that his expert, Dr. Russell, drew attention to fatal flaws in Mr. Miller’s data that rendered Mr. Miller’s opinion inadmissibly weak and speculative. To start, we take issue with Mr. Faltz’s analytical focus—on what was missing. Rule 702, as adopted by Motorola, requires only that the information used by an expert be “sufficient.” Fed. R. Evid. 702(b); see 29 Wright & Miller’s Federal Practice & Procedure § 6268 (2d ed. 2017) (explaining that “the word ‘sufficient’ in Rule 702 signifies that the expert may properly base her opinion on something less  17 than all the pertinent facts or data”). It “does not demand that experts rely on all data that could be deemed relevant,” and it likewise does not “require the expert to seek out the best possible source of relevant information.” Lawes v. CSA Architects & Eng’rs LLP, 963 F.3d 72, 101 (1st Cir. 2020); see also Smith v. BMW N. Am., Inc., 308 F.3d 913, 920-21 (8th Cir. 2002) (reversing the exclusion of expert testimony where the expert “based his estimate of the principal direction of force” in a car crash “on all information he could obtain”). We accordingly begin our analysis with the information on which Mr. Miller did rely: a field sketch incorporating the measurements and observations he made on the night of the crash; the rough calculations he made based on these measurements; his conversations with the witnesses on the scene; a three- dimensional physical reconstruction of how the two cars came together; his own observations of the interior and exterior of the Ford, including the Ford’s airbag; and his knowledge of principles of physics and the nature of airbag design. From this data, Mr. Miller concluded that: (1) the front of the Ford struck the passenger side of the Nissan, (2) the Ford’s airbag fully deployed before the Ford started to rotate, (3) as a result, the driver’s “facial region . . . ma[de] contact with the airbag,” and (4) it was “scientifically and physically impossible” for the driver to have “grazed or missed” the airbag under these circumstances. Reduced to its essence, Mr.  18 Miller’s testimony was that the driver of the Ford hit the airbag more or less head- on because the Ford hit the Nissan more or less head-on. We conclude that the trial court was within its discretion in finding Mr. Miller’s testimony to be reliable. Mr. Miller’s three-dimensional reconstruction of the crash, where he fit the Ford and the Nissan together like the “pieces of a puzzle,” combined with the documentation of the skid marks and gouge marks in the roadway, formed a sufficient factual basis for his conclusion about how the Ford and the Nissan came together. Cf. Clark v. Chrysler Corp., 310 F.3d 461, 470-72 (6th Cir. 2002) (affirming the admission of expert’s crash reconstruction opinion that was “based on his extensive background in automobile safety testing; his examination of [the] truck, the accident scene, the police report, the photographs and the depositions in the case; the state-of-the-art and state-of-the-industry in B-pillars; and general acceptance in the automobile industry regarding B-pillar testing at the time the [vehicle] was manufactured”), vacated on other grounds by Chrysler Corp. v. Clark, 540 U.S. 801 (2003); Salahuddin v. United States, 564 F. Supp. 3d 75, 85 (E.D.N.Y. 2021) (finding accident reconstruction testimony reliable in a bench trial where the expert based his opinion on “trial testimony[,] . . . depositions[,] . . . two visits to the accident site, an inspection of [one vehicle], photos taken of debris from the accident, Google Earth images, the weights of the vehicles, the width of [one vehicle], and the distance between the [vehicle’s] headlight and the ground”).  19 While Mr. Miller conceded that he was unable to conduct a full forensic accident reconstruction, he explained that the data he did gather allowed him to calculate a “range[ ]” of possible speeds and angles for the crash. Thus, we are unable to say that he lacked sufficient facts or data as a matter of law. Cf. Thomson v. Rook, 255 F. Supp. 2d 584, 587 (E.D. Tex. 2001) (admitting an expert’s testimony despite his failure to “mention or discuss comprehensively all variables that may have been at the scene of the collision” because he “ha[d] at least a colorable explanation for assumptions made within a range for applicable variables”). Further, Mr. Miller’s “knowledge of the basic operation of air bags”—the foundation for which Mr. Faltz does not challenge—is a proper basis for his opinion about the functioning of the airbag in this case, especially given his personal examination of the Ford’s airbag. See Smith, 308 F.3d at 920 (reversing the district court’s exclusion of a doctor’s testimony about “whether a properly deployed air bag would have reduced or prevented [the plaintiff’s] injuries”). Mr. Russell’s criticism of Mr. Miller’s calculations of the speed and angle of the collision does not render Mr. Miller’s opinion inadmissible. “Experts frequently disagree and their opinions, if reliable” can be admitted under Rule 702 notwithstanding such disagreement. Smith, 308 F.3d at 921 n.11; cf. Thorndike v. DaimlerChrysler Corp., 266 F. Supp. 2d 172, 179-80 (D. Me. 2003) (admitting the testimony of an expert about the movement of a spare tire during a car crash even  20 where “certain facts . . . might permit other assumptions to be drawn” and the expert’s “calculations rel[ied] heavily on educated guesswork and theory”). We emphasize that Mr. Miller’s testimony sought to address the following topic: how the DNA evidence on the steering wheel came to be there. Although there is little question that the precise angle and speed at which the collision occurred are relevant to this inquiry, the legally significant issues in this case have to do with what the forces of the crash did to the Ford’s driver and its other occupants—and not, for example, whether the Ford exceeded the speed limit at the time of the crash. Put another way, the “relevant reliability concerns” in this case, Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, 526 U.S. 137, 150 (1999), concern the range of circumstances under which the driver could have missed or grazed the airbag and whether the information on which Mr. Miller relied could permissibly serve as the basis for his conclusions on that score. While we do not mean to imply that Mr. Miller’s calculations and the bases for them are an unimportant component of his testimony, Mr. Russell’s and Mr. Faltz’s critiques of them go to weight, not admissibility. See Motorola, 147 A.3d at 757 (“The goal is to deny admission to expert testimony that is not reliable, but to admit competing theories if they are derived from reliable principles that have been reliably applied. . . . [W]e expect that many cases will feature expert witnesses espousing different views of the evidence. Their testimony will be tested by the adversary process and evaluated by the jury.”); Miles v. Gen.  21 Motors Corp., 262 F.3d 720, 724 (8th Cir. 2001) (affirming the admission of testimony about the cause of the plaintiff’s injuries and “conclud[ing] that [the plaintiff’s] criticism of the experts’ testimony is the proper subject for a thorough cross-examination and not the basis for the absolute exclusion of their testimony”); Clay v. Ford Motor Co., 215 F.3d 663, 668-69 (6th Cir. 2000) (affirming the admission of expert testimony where the defendant did not “challenge the principle that dynamics can be used to analyze vehicle designs and predict their motion” and where “[t]he district court, in its discretion, could have decided” the expert’s failure to test his theories “went to the weight of his testimony”); Desrosiers v. Flight Int’l of Fla., Inc., 156 F.3d 952, 961 (9th Cir. 1998) (affirming the admission of expert accident reconstruction testimony where the expert used “circumstantial evidence” such as a “review of maintenance records, wreckage, depositions, service manuals, textbooks, and the radar tape” rather than the analysis of physical evidence to reconstruct the crash); cf. Butts v. United States, 822 A.2d 407, 414-15 (D.C. 2003) (explaining, under the Frye/Dyas standard, that although the conditions in the experiment differed from those of the crash in a number of ways, those differences were for the jury “to consider when assessing the weight of the evidence” and were not grounds for exclusion of the testimony). In addition to his primary argument attacking the sufficiency of Mr. Miller’s facts and data under Rule 702(b), Mr. Faltz also asserts in passing that the trial court  22 erred by simply “listing” the methods and data that Mr. Miller used without further analysis of why they were reliable or were reliably applied to the facts of this case. We agree that the trial court’s discussion of Mr. Miller’s methodology and its application to the facts of the case is sparse. But because we review for abuse of discretion, we will affirm where “the trial court has ruled on each essential criterion” in performing its gatekeeper role, so long as that ruling is supported by the record. Willis, 353 A.3d at 882 (quoting Ibn-Tamas, 407 A.2d at 635). That is so here. Cf. District of Columbia v. Facebook, Inc., 340 A.3d 1, 11 (D.C. 2025) (reversing the exclusion of expert testimony where the trial court’s written order only referred to the hearing transcript, and the hearing transcript revealed that the trial court “did not engage in any meaningful Motorola analysis with respect to” parts of the expert testimony). Further, while expert testimony can be excluded if there is too great of an “analytical gap between the data and the opinion proffered,” Motorola, 147 A.3d at 755 (quoting General Electric Co. v. Joiner, 522 U.S. 136, 146 (1997)), Mr. Faltz does not explain why such a “gap” exists and would warrant reversal in this case. Accordingly, we cannot say that the trial court improperly exercised its discretion in admitting Mr. Miller’s testimony. See Lewis, 263 A.3d at 1059.  23 b. Mr. Chase’s Testimony Mr. Faltz argues that Mr. Chase’s testimony was flawed in ways similar to Mr. Miller’s testimony. First, he argues that if we conclude that Mr. Miller’s testimony should not have been admitted, Mr. Chase’s testimony should not have been admitted either because it analyzed and heavily relied on Mr. Miller’s findings. Second, Mr. Faltz argues that the trial court’s Rule 702 analysis with respect to Mr. Chase is perfunctory and thus legally deficient. Third, Mr. Faltz points to two ways in which Mr. Chase appears to have misunderstood Mr. Miller’s expert report: (1) he assumed that Mr. Miller created his accident reconstruction “immediately following the crash” after “forensically mapp[ing] and document[ing]” “critical scene physical evidence which dissipates over time” and (2) he understood Mr. Miller to have concluded that the Ford moved forward in a straight line nearly seventeen feet before it began its rotation. Mr. Faltz argues that these errors are enough to fatally undermine the reliability of Mr. Chase’s testimony. The government argues that the trial court permissibly found Mr. Chase’s testimony admissible because it found that Mr. Miller’s report—on which Mr. Chase’s testimony was largely based—was admissible. It urges that Mr. Chase’s purported misunderstandings about Mr. Miller’s report are minor matters that do not render his entire opinion unreliable, and that the trial court was within its discretion in admitting the testimony. The government also argues that the trial court did enough to explain why it was  24 admitting Mr. Chase’s testimony by “stat[ing] precisely the principles and methods Chase relied upon and the conclusions he drew from applying those principles to the Miller data.” We briefly recount Mr. Chase’s testimony. Mr. Chase relied on Mr. Miller’s written report and in-court testimony about the likelihood that the Ford struck the Nissan head-on to form his conclusions. He also relied on his own inspection of the Ford’s airbag, along with his personal knowledge of airbag design, physics, and federal automobile safety standards. He testified that where, as here, “a severe frontal impact” initiates a crash, “the driver of a vehicle under those circumstances cannot . . . miss the contact, the interface with the airbag” because that is what federal airbag safety standards require the airbag to do. Mr. Chase admitted that in a different scenario—if, for example, the Ford had been struck on the side, rather than striking the Nissan head-on—it would be possible for the driver to miss the airbag because the driver would be flung laterally at the moment the driver’s side airbag inflated. On cross-examination, when confronted with inaccuracies in his written report, Mr. Chase reaffirmed his conclusion that the Ford’s airbag “operate[d] as it was designed to operate” under the circumstances of the crash. It was within the trial court’s discretion to admit Mr. Chase’s testimony. First, because we have concluded that the trial court did not err in admitting Mr. Miller’s  25 testimony, we reject Mr. Faltz’s argument that Mr. Chase’s testimony was derivatively inadmissible because he relied on Mr. Miller’s testimony. See, e.g., Kim v. Am. Honda Motor Co., 86 F.4th 150, 162 (5th Cir. 2023) (holding that “[t]he district court did not abuse its discretion when it found [plaintiff’s second expert] did more than ‘co-sign’” the claims of the plaintiff’s first expert). Second, while we again have reservations about the brevity of the trial court’s analysis of some of Mr. Chase’s testimony, we are not persuaded that this is reversible error, for the same reasons we are unpersuaded by this argument as applied to Mr. Miller’s expert testimony. Cf. Clay, 215 F.3d at 667 (affirming where, “[a]lthough the district court did not explicitly recite that [the expert] testimony was relevant and reliable, its rulings indicate that it made that determination”). Finally, while Mr. Faltz is correct that Mr. Chase’s testimony relied in part on a misunderstanding of several statements in Mr. Miller’s expert report, we are not persuaded that these inaccuracies rendered his entire testimony unreliable. Mr. Chase initially appeared to believe that Mr. Miller had conducted his analysis of the crash site immediately after it took place and, therefore, that Mr. Miller may have collected more evidence than he actually did. Mr. Chase reiterated the conclusions he drew based on Mr. Miller’s field sketch and the physical evidence Mr. Miller did collect and document at that time. Mr. Chase also may have misinterpreted one of Mr. Miller’s statements regarding the movement of the Nissan during the crash:  26 although Mr. Miller concluded that the Nissan moved “laterally” about seventeen feet and that the Ford moved in a diagonal line after the collision, Mr. Chase took this analysis and appeared to assume that the Ford moved forward about seventeen feet before beginning any rotational or diagonal movement at all. Mr. Chase acknowledged that these assessments were “approximation[s].” While an expert’s total misunderstanding of the information on which their conclusion is based can be grounds for exclusion, see, e.g., Montgomery Cnty. v. Microvote Corp., 320 F.3d 440, 448-49 (3d Cir. 2003) (affirming the exclusion of expert testimony where the expert “could not identify the source or basis of some of” the documents on which he relied), the imperfections in Mr. Chase’s testimony do not rise to that level, see Hardeman v. Monsanto, 997 F.3d 941, 961-62 (9th Cir. 2021) (explaining that “[i]mperfect application of methodology may not render expert testimony unreliable” where the inaccuracy flows from a “minor flaw” (citation modified)), overruled in part on other grounds by Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, 146 S. Ct. 2001, 2010-11 (2026); Kieffer v. Weston Land, Inc., 90 F.3d 1496, 1499-1500 (10th Cir. 1996) (rejecting a c