In United States v. Keegan, No. 22-13019 (11th Cir. Dec. 17, 2025) (Grant, Newsom, Abudu), the Court affirmed Keegan’s conviction for CP production, after a conditional guilty plea preserving Keegan’s right to appeal the district court’s pre-trial evidentiary ruling.
The district court had excluded a defense expert psychologist’s proffered testimony about Keegan’s post-indictment statements, made to that defense expert, that she had been abused by her husband (the recipient of the CP that Keegan produced). Keegan argued that the statement was made for medical diagnosis, and thus admissible as a hearsay exception under FRE 803(4). The district court concluded that Keegan recounted the abuse “to prepare the witness to testify to a jury”—not for “diagnosis or treatment” and thus her statements did not satisfy FRE 803(4).
After an extensive parsing of Fed. R. Evidence 803(4), the Court found no clear error and no abuse of discretion in the district court’s ruling excluding Keegan’s statements to the defense expert: “Between the plain text of Rule 803(4), the background of the traditional rules regarding medical testimony, and the district court’s factual findings . . . we agree with the district court that because Keegan’s allegations of abuse were not made “for” medical diagnosis or treatment, those statements cannot qualify for Rule 803(4)’s hearsay exception.” It was therefore “not enough that Keegan asked for a medical diagnosis and got one.”
The Court’s holding created a circuit split with what the Court considered outdated opinions in the Second, Fourth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits.
Newsom concurred, explaining that, even though Keegan’s interpretation of Rule 803(4) was “linguistically plausible,” “proper textualism” “isn’t wooden ‘literalism’ ” and her interpretation was still contrary to “how a real-life, flesh-and-blood individual would understand the phrase ‘statement . . . made for . . . medical diagnosis’” “as used in the context of a compilation of rules regulating the admission and exclusion of hearsay evidence.”
Opinion available here: https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202213019.pdf