In United States v. Stefan Eberhard Zappey, 164 F.4th 1348 (11th Cir. 2026) (Abudu, Rosenbaum, Wilson), the Court affirmed Zappey’s convictions for multiple counts of aggravated sexual abuse, and abusive sexual contact with children under 12.
For 20 years, Zappey taught German language classes to children at an American school on a military base in Germany. In 2019 and 2020, four women alleged that Zappey had sexually assaulted them when they were students in his class. A subsequent military investigation concluded that Zappey had abused four students, under the age of 12, from 2006 to 2010. He was indicted accordingly, and exercised his right to a jury trial. Zappey’s defense theory was that the women’s memories of being abuse by Zappey as children were unreliable. After a 5-day trial, Zappey was convicted of all 8 counts, and he was later sentence to life imprisonment.
Zappey claimed on appeal that the district court abused its discretion by limiting one of Zappey’s two childhood memory experts to trial testimony relating only to topics already covered by the government’s memory expert, and by entirely excluding Zappey’s second expert.
The Court found no abuse of discretion as to the limitations on Zappey’s first expert because the district court carefully considered Zappey’s arguments in favor of the testimony, before rejecting those aspects of the proffered that the district court found to be “common knowledge,” “not a good fit for the case,” or “simply a method to attack the reliability of the witnesses.” Further, the district court sufficiently permitted the first defense expert to rebut the government’s expert, the district court’s limitations did not prevent Zappey from “poking holes” in key witnesses’ reliability or otherwise preclude the establishment of a defense, and the government offered corroborating testimony of non-victim witnesses.
The Court also found the district court did not “clearly or obviously” err when it excluded the second defense expert’s proffered testimony because it was cumulative, pursuant to the test for cumulative testimony in Johnson v. United States, 780 F.2d 902, 905 (11th Cir. 1986). Even if erroneous, the wholesale exclusion of the second expert’s testimony was also harmless, because the evidence of guilt beyond victim testimony was “substantial,” and included the testimony of several adult witnesses to the sexual abuse or to victim reports of abuse.
https://media.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/files/202311607.pdf