The Federal Criminal Appeals Blog

It's difficult not to love an opinion that contains this paragraph:

Heraclitus famously said that one never steps into the same river twice. What he meant was that one never steps into the same water; the river is the same, even though its substance is always changing. And so a conspiracy can be the same even if all the acts committed pursuant to it are different, because it is the terms of the agreement rather than the details of implementation that determine its boundaries.

Federal prosecutors love conspiracies more than Oliver Stone. Prove an agreement between A and B to further an illegal end, and you can bring in all sorts of stuff against A that she didn't actually do (B did). And you only have to prove a constructive agreement - not an actual one.

The Seventh Circuit, though, in an opinion by Judge Posner in United States v. Schiro, discussed how the Double Jeopardy Clause can throw a curveball into a conspiracy prosecution. Sadly, though, the Double Jeopardy issue did not carry the day for those charged with the federal offense.

As Judge Posner explains,

Double jeopardy can take two forms. One is prosecution for a crime the elements of which overlap the elements of a crime involving the same facts for which the defendant had been prosecuted previously. And in such a case, a case "where the same act or transaction constitutes a violation of two distinct statutory provisions, the test to be applied to determine whether there are two offenses or only one, is whether each provision requires proof of a fact which the other does not." For example, there would be only one offense for purposes of assessing double jeopardy if the second prosecution was for a lesser included offense of the crime for which the defendant had been prosecuted the first time. The other form of double jeopardy is prosecuting a person a second or subsequent time for the same offense, and that can be a difficult determination to make when the offense is conspiracy.

But here, two men were accused of a RICO conspiracy who were previously tried for a RICO conspiracy with each other. So, was the second RICO conspiracy the same conspiracy as the first one, or a separate conspiracy?

Judge Posner suggests this way of teasing the issue out:

A worker at Ford Motor Company's River Rouge Complex is an employee of Ford Motor Company. His agreement to work on the River Rouge assembly line contributes both to the plant's output and to the output of the company as a whole, of which River Rouge's output is simply a part. If Ford produced sawed-off shotguns rather than automobiles, the worker could be prosecuted for conspiring with employees of Ford or employees at the River Rouge plant to produce an illegal weapon, but he could not be prosecuted for two separate conspiracies, because the members and the objectives and the activities of the two conspiracies (conspiracy with employees of Ford, conspiracy with employees at River Rouge) would be identical.

But if after producing sawed-off shotguns in the River Rouge plant an employee who had worked there is promoted into the Ford executive suite in Detroit as a regional manager and while there prepares financial reports designed to conceal from the government Ford's income from the production of illegal weaponry at River Rouge and other Ford plants, he has joined a separate though overlapping conspiracy.

In Mr. Schiro's case, the men were charged with being leaders of a Chicago street gang. There were two levels of hierarchy - street crews and "the Outfit". "The Outfit" ran the street crews, but also directed certain financial decisions and commissioned and carried out the murder of potential informants.

Thus, every street crew member was a member of "the Outfit" but not every member of "the Outfit" was a member of a particular street crew.

If as in our first Ford hypothetical you do street crew business only, you are not working for two different enterprises even though the street crew is a branch; the enterprises are no more different than two nested Russian dolls are. But if you murder, which is Outfit business because it is too sensitive to be left to the street crews, you are working for the Outfit in a respect that is different from your street crew work; you are demonstrating that your agreement to assist the Outfit is broader than and distinct from your agreement to assist your street crew, just as conspiring to assemble shotguns at a plant is different from conspiring to conceal the assembly of shotguns at numerous plants.

Alas, the government's allegations in the recent case and the prior one were separate enough that the two alleged conspiracies were, indeed, separate agreements. And so the double jeopardy challenge failed.

Judge Wood dissented. She started by observing that,

Calabrese and Marcello had each already been convicted and imprisoned for their part in the street crews that lie at the heart of the Outfit's Chicago operation. See United States v. Zizzo, 120 F.3d 1338 (7th Cir. 1997) (Marcello), and ante at 3. Those prosecutions coveredthe period from 1978 to 1992 for Calabrese and from 1979 to 1990 for Marcello. The current prosecution entirely subsumes the span of those conspiracies. I therefore dissent, on that basis only, from the decision to affirm those two convictions.

As she observes,

We must recognize, as have our sister circuits, that a crime family in "a lower level of authority within the hierarchy of organized crime" is still a component of the same crime family. United States v. Langella, 804 F.2d 185, 189 (2d Cir. 1986); see also United States v. Ciancaglini, 858 F.2d 923 (3d Cir. 1988) (concluding that two Philadelphia-based crime families were part of the same enterprise). If the Street Crews were "self-sufficient enterprises that function[] without oversight" from the Outfit, we would have a different case. Langella, 804 F.2d at 189. But as the majority concedes, they are not. The Street Crews were the mob's hands, the Outfit its head. There is no way to divide the two.

Alas. The sweet sorrow of a well-reasoned dissent.

This was not, however, a total loss for the home team. The court of appeals reversed on one happy ground:

The defendants were ordered to pay restitution in conformity with the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of 1996, 18 U.S.C. § 3663A. The total amount, all of which was for the lost future earnings of 14 of the 18 murder victims whom the defendants were found to have conspired to kill, exceeded $4 million. All but 1 percent of this amount, $44,225.73, was allocated jointly and severally to the four defendants, see United States v. Dokich, 614 F.3d 314, 318 (7th Cir. 2010), other than [one defendant], who was assessed only the 1 percent because he had joined the conspiracy late, in 1999. As all the murders occurred before then, it was improper to assess him any share of the restitution ordered. United States v. Squirrel, 588 F.3d 207, 215-16 (4th Cir. 2009).

Perhaps not the most impressive victory.

See also:

• Judge Posner On Harboring, the Dictionary, and Trusting the Government


• Pro Competitive Bid Rigging Is Not A Crime, Or, This Chicago Garbage Bid Doesn't Stink


• Judge Posner Teaches District Court Judges How To Avoid The Supreme Court's Holding in Tapia

Imagine you were going to a professional meeting. Maybe it's a weeklong off-site skills training for work. Maybe it's an odd kind of a conference in your hometown. You'll be at some strange new location during the day, then go home at night.

At the start of the exercise, people seem interested in you. They ask you a lot about yourself. But then, at some point, you're given a seat and told to just sit, watch, and learn.

Next, the woman who is leading the training reads to you from a list of instructions that she had prepared in advance. You are not allowed to ask questions. Your fellow participants aren't allowed to talk about the instructions.

Some stuff happens - a few people talk to you and they ask questions of other people who answer them. Maybe you read some documents.

After that stuff is done, the person who read to you at the start of the training reads to you again to tell you how to figure out what the people were talking to you about. She gives you a list of instructions, and tells you to go talk to the other participants, but you have to follow the rules she gave you.

Also, she may or may not give you a copy of those rules.

This is, in many ways, the experience of a juror in a federal criminal trial. Jurors are given instructions - which they are presumed to follow closely - only once, and often only orally.

In United States v. Lawson, decided recently by the Fourth Circuit, one of the jurors was eager to understand the elements of the crime he was supposed to figure out if someone was guilty of.

The government alleged that a number of people, including Scott Lawson, were on trial for violating the animal fighting prohibition of the Animal Welfare Act, 7 U.S.C. § 2156(a). The defendants in this case were accused of cockfighting (or, rather, getting game fowl to fight - the defendants themselves weren't actually fighting. That would have probably not been a federal crime).

The Animal Welfare Act prohibits "sponsoring" a cockfight.

One of the jurors, named Jury 177, after listening to the evidence, was curious. He wasn't sure that he knew what "sponsoring" means.

He did what most folks these days do when they don't know the meaning of a word. He went to Wikipedia and looked up "sponsoring." The jury then found the folks accused of sponsoring cockfights guilty.

Six days after the jury returned the guilty verdict, one of the jurors told a court security officer than Juror 177 had been Googling for justice.

The district court appointed a lawyer for Juror 177, and had a hearing about what happened.

Even though Juror 177 was looking at a criminal contempt charge - and, indeed, was found guilty of contempt and sentenced to a fine and community service - Juror 177 testified that he had searched on the internet to learn what "sponsoring" means and shared what he found with his fellow jurors.

What Juror 177 didn't realize, apparently, is that he was told by the district court judge that he wasn't allowed to consult the internet as a part of his deliberations. The problem this doesn't raise for the Fourth Circuit is that the way we instruct jurors is sort of bizarre as a kind of human interaction, and jurors don't listen to jury instructions. [FN1]

No, instead the Fourth Circuit was troubled by the presence of Wikipedia.

Even though Googling to find the meaning of a word is incredibly common - even Judge Posner does it - the Fourth Circuit held that using Wikipedia was just too unreliable to allow this verdict to stand. [FN2]

As the Fourth Circuit said,

Given the open-access nature of Wikipedia, the danger in relying on a Wikipedia entry is obvious and real. As the "About Wikipedia" material aptly observes, "[a]llowing anyone to edit Wikipedia means that it is more easily vandalized or susceptible to unchecked information." Id. Further, Wikipedia aptly recognizes that it "is written largely by amateurs."Id.

We observe that we are not the first federal court to be troubled by Wikipedia's lack of reliability. See Bing Shun Li v. Holder, 400 F. App'x 854, 857-58 (5th Cir. 2010) (expressing "disapproval of the [immigration judge's] reliance on Wikipedia and [warning] against any improper reliance on it or similarly unreliable internet sources in the future"); Badasa v. Mukasey, 540 F.3d 909, 910-11 (8th Cir. 2008) (criticizing immigration judge's use of Wikipedia and observing that an entry "could be in the middle of a large edit or it could have been recently vandalized"); Crispin v. Christian Audigier, Inc., 717 F. Supp. 2d 965, 977 (C.D. Cal. 2010) (criticizing parties' reliance on Wikipedia); Kole v. Astrue, No. CV 08- 0411, 2010 WL 1338092, at *7 n.3 (D. Idaho Mar. 31, 2010) (admonishing counsel from using Wikipedia as an authority, observing that "Wikipedia is not a reliable source at this level of discourse"); Baldanzi v. WFC Holdings Corp., No. 07-CV-9551, 2010 WL 125999, at *3 n.1 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 13, 2010) (observing that Wikipedia "touts its own unreliability"); Campbell ex rel. Campbell v. Secretary of Health and Human Servs., 69 Fed. Cl. 775, 781 (Fed. Cl. 2006) (observing dangers inherent in relying on Wikipedia entry).

The case was remanded for a new trial.

So, to summarize: John McCain can use Wikipedia for his speeches. Judge Posner can use Google for his opinions. Jurors cannot use Wikipedia instead of following the jury instructions.

[FN1] - Juror 177 was found in contempt because the court's directions went specifically to him; they weren't of general applicability like in this case. Though this raises a question - how can failing to follow a jury instruction subject someone to contempt? Can a jury be held in contempt en mass when they nullify? Should the trial jury be held in contempt every time the court of appeals reverses for insufficient evidence when the jury convicted? Juror 177 was, presumably, trying in good faith to resolve a Doesn't this seem a little crazy?

[FN2] - To be fair, there is a multi-part test that the court of appeals applied - the unreliability of Wikipedia only went to one part. Though the rest of it is pretty dry.

The Supreme Court recently decided two cases about what a lawyer has to do when representing a client deciding whether to take a guilty plea or go to trial - Lafler v. Cooper and Missouri v. Frye.

These cases hold, basically, that if a defense lawyer messes up when representing a person in connection with a decision to plead guilty, that violates the person's constitutional right to effective assistance of counsel. As a result, the harm that was done by the lawyer's mistake can, and must, be undone. So, a person who was hurt by a lawyer's mistake can challenge what happened to him and possibly have a conviction or sentence undone.

The New York Times took the notable step of issuing an editorial praising the decisions. Lots of folks have commented on the effects of the rulings (like this guest post at Sentencing Law and Policy).

Lafler, I think, will prove the more interesting case. It definitely has the more interesting facts.

Mr. Cooper's Lawyer's Folly

In Lafler, Mr. Cooper, was charged with assault with intent to murder. The person Mr. Cooper stood accused of assaulting was shot in the lower half of his body.

The government offered Mr. Cooper a plea to lesser charges that would have resulted in a sentence of 51 to 85 months in prison. Mr. Cooper rebuffed these offers based on his lawyer's advice that a person cannot be found guilty of assault with intent to murder if the person is aiming at the lower half of the victim's body.

This singularly bizarre bit of legal "advice" was not accurate - just like it isn't accurate that the police can't arrest a husband and a wife for the same crime.

Yet, Mr. Cooper relied on his lawyer's erroneous "no murder if you're shooting below the waist" maxim and went to trial. He was convicted, and sentenced to a mandatory minimum sentence of 185 to 360 months.

The Supreme Court held that, on these facts, Mr. Cooper was not competently represented by counsel. As a result, in the future, people who went to trial based on a bad assessment of what will happen at trial have a tenable claim of ineffective assistance.

Will The Floodgates Open?

The dissent said that this is going to open a floodgate of litigation, as people who are in prison try to use Lafler (and Frye) to overturn their sentences.

So, I'm trying to think about who will most benefit from this opinion.

I think, most clearly, it would be people who went to trial, when there was a viable plea offer for less time than the person received, and where the person received a significant sentence after trial.

The Court quoted a lovely law review article about the perils of going to trial in this age of plea-bargaining:

The expected post-trial sentence is imposed in only a few percent of cases. It is like the sticker price for cars: only an ignorant, ill-advised consumer would view full price as the norm and anything less a bargain

So, as I read Lafler, a lawyer has an obligation to meaningfully and competently discuss whether to take it. As the Court says,

If a plea bargain has been offered, a defendant has the right to effective assistance of counsel in considering whether to accept it. If that right is denied, prejudice can be shown if loss of the plea opportunity led to a trial resulting in a conviction on more serious charges or the imposition of a more severe sentence.

I think this means that a lawyer advising a person looking at trial or a plea has to tell him, competently, what the strengths and weaknesses of his case, and the government's case, are.

Obviously, there can be some room to wiggle there - if a lawyer says that there's a 35% chance of conviction, when, in fact, there's a 38% chance (assuming anything in a trial could ever be known with such precision), it would be hard to see how that kind of error would require a reversal.

But there's a lot of room to move in a challenge to a person's conviction.

What if, for example, a person's lawyer simply didn't anticipate that a bit of evidence would be significant? The government had, say, an email that was particularly damning. When discussing a plea, the person's lawyer simply didn't mention the effect that this email could have on a jury. It seems that could be close enough to the "no murder if you're shooting below the waist" rule to be worth a challenge.

Who Gets More Serious Sentences After Trial Than On A Plea?

Lafler will confer the most benefit to people who faced the most significant trial penalty.

Thinking just of federal cases, I'm sure there are a lot of candidates for this kind of relief - people who are now facing mandatory minimum sentences that could have been pled around, or enhanced sentences based on prior convictions that wouldn't have been triggered on a plea - but I think one interesting area will be white-collar offenses.

Since Enron, there have been a lot of white-collar prosecutions. And, since the guidelines get crazy when the loss amounts get high, I would think virtually any white-collar case where a person was sentenced near the sentencing guidelines after trial, and where there was a plea offered before trial, would be worth thinking about as a candidate for relief under Lafler.

One additional interesting thing about white-collar cases is that they tend to be the kinds of cases where honest conversations about plea options happen less frequently.

In the average drug case in federal court, there is a frank conversation about whether to plead. Either the client (or his family) is bearing the costs of the representation, or the lawyer is court-appointed. In either case, the economic incentives line up to encourage that conversation.

In white-collar cases where the person accused of the crime is indemnified, the incentives are different. The client isn't paying for his legal fees, and the law firm has an interest in seeing the case go to trial. A frank conversation about whether trial can be won or lost, or whether an acceptable plea can be secured, can be challenging.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong about that. As these convictions get challenged under Lafler, the plea advice that lawyers have been giving, and their advice about what's going to happen at trial, will be getting new scrutiny.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

Air travel is always hard, but Samir Ibisevic's trip was much worse than most.

His father had died, and he was flying to Sarajevo for the funeral. He'd been up all night traveling from Syracuse to Dulles with his mother, Rahima. He had a headache and he was upset by his father's death.

He also had $5,000 in cash in his pocket, and his mom had another $35,000 in her bags.

A customs officer, doing a random check of passengers, approached Mr. Ibisevic. The officer explained that it isn't illegal to take cash out of the country, but if you want to take more than $10,000, you have to fill out a reporting form.

The officer asked Mr. Ibisevic if he was traveling with any cash. Mr. Ibisevic said he had $5,000.

The officer took Mr. Ibisevic and his mother to a more private area. He asked again, how much currency they were taking out of the country "as a whole." Again Mr. Ibisevic said $5,000.

Mr. Ibisevic, as much of the defense evidence at his later trial showed, speaks very little English and reads even less.

The officer showed him a reporting form. Mr. Ibisevic looked at the form for a minute or two. The officer then told him to write the amount of cash he was taking out of the country on the form. Mr. Ibisevic wrote "$5,000."

The officers then searched Mr. Ibisevic's bags, as well as those of his mother. They found the $40,000 in cash.

The Criminal Charges

Mr. Ibisevic was charged with failing to report the international transportation of currency, cash smuggling, and making a false statement.

Each offense requires that it be committed "willfully." The sole issue at trial is whether Mr. Ibisevic intended to make a false statement or fail to report, or, instead, if he simply didn't realize he was obligated to.

The Mother and Child Reunion

Mr. Ibisevic's mother testified against him, under an immunity agreement. She said that the money was his, and that she speaks no English (she testified through an interpreter).

On cross, Mr. Ibisevic's lawyer asked Mr. Ibisevic's mother what Mr. Ibisevic said before the customs agent showed him the reporting form and asked him to sign it.

As the mother started to answer, the district court, without an objection from the government, interrupted the testimony. The court expressed concern that the testimony would be hearsay.

Mr. Ibisevic's lawyer explained what the answer would be - Mr. Ibisevic's mother would say that her son told her that the agents wanted to know the value of the bags if they were lost.

The district court thought this evidence was hearsay and refused to let it in.

Mr. Ibisevic's defense case focused on how limited Mr. Ibisevic's English was. Mr. Ibisevic himself testified that he didn't know he had to report the cash, but that he thought the customs officers were asking about the value of his luggage in case it was lost.

He was convicted, and sentenced to two years probation. He also had to forfeit the cash.

The Appeal

Mr. Ibisevic appealed based on the district court's hearsay ruling.

In United States v. Ibisevic, the Fourth Circuit held that, first, Mr. Ibisevic's statement to his mother about what he thought they were asking wasn't hearsay.

Hearsay is when a person is testifying about something someone said outside of the courtroom and they're trying to prove that what the person said is true.

So, if a witness says, "John said the money was counterfeit" and the person offering that testimony is trying to prove that the money was counterfeit, then that would be hearsay.

But, if, instead, the person offering the witness is trying to prove that John thought the money was counterfeit, then it isn't hearsay - it just goes to what John thought.

Here, Mr. Ibisevic wasn't trying to prove that the agents were asking him about the value of his luggage - they clearly weren't. Rather, he was trying to prove what he thought they were asking.

So, the testimony wouldn't have been hearsay. Though, even if it were hearsay, it still would have been admissible under the "present sense impression" exception to the hearsay rule.

The court of appeals also concluded that the error wasn't harmless. The issue of Mr. Ibisevic's intent was the only issue at trial. This evidence bore directly on that.

So, Mr. Ibisevic is going back for another trial.

One of the most jarring things about federal criminal practice, especially for lawyers who are well trained in civil litigation - is how many procedural rights and doctrines don't apply.

You want to move for summary judgment? No such motion exists (as a general matter, but see this post).

You want to take a deposition? You're likely out of luck. (Yes, that's right, you get more information about the other side's case in a civil case - which is only about money - than you do in a criminal case where someone might go to prison).

Yet, every now and again, a decision comes down that reminds you that in some cases - perhaps rare cases - the old familiar doctrines from law school can provide a benefit in a federal criminal case.

United States v. Valdiviez-Garza is one such case.

There, the Eleventh Circuit ordered the district court to dismiss an indictment because of the doctrine of collateral estoppel.

That's right - collateral estoppel. In a criminal case.

Collateral estoppel, for the one non-lawyer reader of this blog (hi Mom!), is the rule that once an issue is fully and finally resolved between any two parties, it is settled, and can't be argued again.

How does this arise in a criminal case? Here's what happened.

Mr. Valdiviez-Garcia was charged with illegal reentry. The elements of illegal reentry are that the person charged:

(1) was an alien at the time of the offense; (2) who had previously been removed or deported; (3) and had reentered the United States after removal; (4) without having received the express consent of the Attorney General.

The thing is, Mr. Valdiviez-Garza had already been tried for illegal reentry years before. In that case, he was acquitted.

Mr. Valdiviez-Garza's dad, it seems, was a United States citizen. And, under certain circumstances, if one of a person's parents is a citizen, the person is a citizen.

In the first trial, the only issue was whether Mr. Valdiviez-Garza was a citizen. His lawyer focused on only one issue in the trial - the lawyer cross-examined only one witness, and that cross dealt only with Mr. Valdiviez-Garza's citizenship.

The jury acquitted Mr. Valdiviez-Garza in that case. Because there was only one issue in the first trial, the Eleventh Circuit determined that Mr. Valdiviez-Garza was acquitted on the basis of reasonable doubt about his citizenship.

Therefore, the Eleventh Circuit held, it is finally settled that there is a reasonable doubt as to whether Mr. Valdiviez-Garza is a United States citizen. Under collateral estoppel, the United States government cannot take a position contrary to there being reasonable doubt about whether he is a citizen.

So, when, years later, Mr. Valdiviez-Garza was indicted, again, for illegal reentry, the Eleventh Circuit ordered the district court to dismiss the case, because there is reasonable doubt as to an element of the offense.

Interestingly, the Eleventh Circuit ordered the district court to dismiss the appeal on an interlocutory appeal - without a trial. As the court of appeals explained,

Because the collateral estoppel doctrine implicates the constitutional protection against double jeopardy, we have jurisdiction to review the interlocutory decision under the collateral order doctrine.

Let's hope Mr. Valdiviez-Garcia was not held in custody too long on this charge before the Eleventh Circuit ordered the indictment dismissed.

As the internet has made it easier for people to share information - from snarky comments about published criminal cases in the federal circuits, to snarky comments about politics or the Academy Awards - it has made trading child pornography much easier.

Twenty years ago, to trade child pornography, you had to use the mail or meet someone with the same interest. Now, just about any person with an internet connection can find this contraband in less than an hour.

The easy flow and production of child pornography is a serious social problem. My concern is that the only solution we seem to be thinking about is to criminalize the market for it and make the punishments for participating in this market draconian.

A Very Large Opinion

The Eleventh Circuit's opinion in United States v. McGarity is a glimpse into the world of child pornography.

Law enforcement learned of a massive online collective of child pornography users. The ring used a sophisticated web of encryption, changing bulletin boards, and membership tests to weed out law enforcement and communicate with each other.

It had leaders - using names such as "Yardbird" "Helen" "Soft" and "Tex" who enforced security and internal discipline. They also decided who was able to join.

After an investigation into the group, fourteen people were arrested. None of the people arrested was a leader in the child pornography ring - though "Helen" was prosecuted in Britain.

The men prosecuted in the United States received sentences ranging from twenty years to fifty years. The leader of the ring, "Helen," was sentenced in Britain to 12 and a half years.

The court of appeals opinion in McGarity is a massive 130 pages. Much of the case in the district court was affirmed, though there were some defense victories of note.

Obstruction of Justice

All the men charged were also charged with obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. 1512(c). The superseding indictment, following the language of the statute, accused the men of trying to obstruct an official proceeding. It did not say what that proceeding was.

The Eleventh Circuit held that this was insufficient. Following an opinion from the First Circuit, the court of appeals held that if the government is going to charge obstruction of an official proceeding, it has to say what official proceeding was obstructed.

This is a neat exception to the general rule that a prosecutor has to merely parrot the statute in order to adequately allege an offense. The Eleventh Circuit said that an indictment that doesn't say what official proceeding was obstructed doesn't provide enough notice of how the law was broken. This is fair enough - it's just also true of, say, 75% of the indictments that come out of a federal grand jury.

It's a step in the right direction at least.

Those convictions were vacated and that count of the superseding indictment was vacated.

CEE Requires Three

Finally, all of the men accused were convicted of a violation of statute that criminalizes participating in a Child Exploitation Enterprise under 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(g). A CEE charge requires that the jury finds that a person participated in a series of at least three other child pornography offenses.

Yet one of the men accused was convicted of the CEE charge and was only convicted of two underlying child pornography charges. His CEE conviction was vacated.

Conspiracy is a Lesser Included Offense of CEE

Many of the men were also convicted of conspiracy to do things relating to the distribution of child pornography. They were also convicted of the CEE charge. They argued that the conspiracy charge was a lesser included offense of CEE. For that reason, the conspiracy charge should be vacated, under double jeopardy principles. (see this post for a more thorough explanation of the double jeopardy principles involved).

As luck would have it, the guy who had his CEE conviction vacated because he was only convicted of two underlying acts was also convicted of conspiracy. His conspiracy conviction stands.

One of the most disturbing trends in federal law enforcement, is the way the criminal law is being used to regulate business practices.

If someone commits a substantial fraud - that's an appropriate basis for a prosecution. But we shouldn't put people in prison just because something bad happens in business.[FN1]

The Sixth Circuit's opinion in United States v. Parkes is a good example of why prosecution shouldn't be the best option for a bad business decision (as opposed to, say, regulatory enforcement action, or a civil suit).

Remington Industries

Timothy Parkes and Mark Mourier had a vision. They wanted to start a company that would manufacture and distribute floor mats for automobiles.

They started the company in Canada, but soon moved it to Benton, Tennessee. It grew to become one of the largest employers in Benton.

Of course, any business needs a relationship with a bank. Mr. Parkes and Mr. Mourier developed a relationship with the President of Benton Bank - Jim Goddard.

At one point, Parkes and Mourier had an idea - a fantastically bad idea. They would change their manufacturing process, and make floor mats using untested chemicals. It required them to redesign and upgrade their manufacturing process - a massively expensive proposition.

The end result of the upgrade was that Remington made floor mats that would melt in the summer heat.

This change cost the company more than $1.5 million from 2000 through 2002. They retooled their company, and shut down the new manufacturing line. They started buying floor mats made in China - converting from being a manufacturer to a distributor. This transition was going well, but they needed money to keep going.

As a result, the company had to go to Mr. Goddard to borrow more money from Benton Bank.

Benton Bank

Benton Bank was a small bank, with less than $10,000,000 in capital. The FDIC wouldn't let Benton Bank lend more than 25% of its capital to any one customer.

Remington's loans exceeded these limits. As a result, Mr. Goddard asked Remington to borrow money from someone else.

Remington did. They borrowed from a private equity firm, and repaid Benton Bank. As a part of the deal, Benton Bank had to agree to issue an irrevocable line of credit to Remington.[FN2]

Remington then defaulted on the private equity firm's loan, and the private equity firm forced Benton Bank to honor its line of credit.

Things were a little hairy at that point. Benton Bank honored its line of credit, but was then in violation of the FDIC's requirements. Then, Mr. Goddard had a very clever idea.

Mr. Goddard

Mr. Goddard was, as it happens, already embezzling sums of money from Benton Bank. He was a man who knew his way around the fraudulent booking of a loan.

Faced with a need to make the FDIC think that his bank's position was not in violation of their regulations, he simply booked ten small loans to non-existent entities, then took the total of those loans and gave the money to Remington.

Problem solved. Sort of.

Mr. Goddard Gets In Trouble

As the court of appeals noted, "[e]ventually Goddard's years of wrongdoing unraveled and he left the Bank."

After he left, and as things were starting to move to federal law enforcement's attention, someone found a fax in Mr. Goddard's office, which was a printed email to the lawyer for Remington. The email that was faxed was from Mr. Parkes, and copied Mr. Mourier, and listed ten new companies that Mr. Parkes sought to have the lawyer create.

The ten company names were the same companies that Mr. Goddard used to create the fake accounts on Benton Bank's books.

Mr. Parkes and Mr. Mourier Get Into Trouble

This was enough for the FBI. Mr. Parkes and Mr. Mourier were indicted for bank fraud.

Though Mr. Goddard was a government cooperator, he was not called by the government as a witness. Instead, the government relied heavily on the fax as evidence that Mr. Parkes and Mr. Mourier knew what Mr. Goddard was doing.

This was enough for the jury. Or, at least it was as to Mr. Parkes. After trial, Mr. Parkes was convicted of ten counts of bank fraud. Mr. Mourier was acquitted.

The Sixth Circuit

This evidence, however, was not enough for the Sixth Circuit. Its not often to see a court of appeals reverse a conviction for sufficiency of the evidence, but they did. In a lovely turn of phrase, the court concluded that,

Even viewing the record in the light most favorable to the government, there was insufficient evidence to connect Parkes to Goddard's fraud, much less to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Parkes intended that fraud. Surprisingly, the government offered no testimony from Goddard to establish that Parkes cooperated in, or even knew of, the scheme, even though Goddard had already pleaded guilty with an agreement requiring him to testify "completely and truthfully . . . if called upon by the United States to do so." While that failure does not directly impact the sufficiency of the evidence, it does leave the evidentiary cupboard nearly bare.

Not content to stop there, the court of appeals then went on to criticize the district court for not allowing the defense to introduce evidence of Mr. Goddard's prior embezzlement, and to criticize the prosecutor for an inappropriate argument in closing.

The inappropriate argument was particularly bad. The prosecutor told the jury that an acquittal would let Parkes and Mourier keep $4 million dollars. But the prosecutor already knew that the money had been paid back to the bank. Indeed, the prosecutor had argued - successfully - not to let that evidence get to the jury.

This is a fantastic case - it's a lovely rebuke to the government for assuming that everyone who deals with a bad apple is, herself, bad.

[FN1] - Relatedly, the idea that any time there's a recession someone on Wall Street should go to prison radically misunderstands the proper function of a system of criminal justice. Sure, if you want to form an angry mob and attack the people who caused something bad, sending executives to prison for bad decisions makes sense. But a more enlightened view is that the government ought to first prove that a person did something that she knew was a crime before she is sent to prison, not just that she worked on Wall Street shortly before the economy took a nosedive.

Kathyrn White had a difficult relationship with cars.

One morning, as she arrived at work at the IRS in Chattanooga, an African-American man in a red and white patterned shirt approached her with a gun. He ordered her to start her car. She did. He drove away in it.

The police later arrested Gary Clay, an African-American man, for the carjacking.

Ms. White never identified Mr. Clay for the police. And, before trial, she died in an automobile accident.

About an hour after the carjacking, an unshaven African-American man used some Ms. White's bank cards to withdraw money. The ATM had a camera that captured a picture of the man. An FBI agent thought that the man in the picture was Mr. Clay.

The police looked for Ms. White's car for days. Finally, they found it in an apartment complex. The parking space it was in was assigned. When they went to the unit assigned to the space, they found two women, Ms. Abernathy and Ms. Hancock. They also found Mr. Clay.

Ms. Hancock leased the unit, and let the police search the apartment. The police found the keys to Ms. White's car. Inside the car, they found a CD that had a number of pictures on it - including photos of Mr. Clay wearing a red and white shirt similar to the one worn by the carjacker.

Mr. Clay was charged with carjacking.

Mr. Clay's trial

The government wanted to use evidence about Mr. Clay's past against him, based on Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b).

Rule 404(b) lets the government in a criminal case introduce evidence about a person's prior bad acts in order to show something relevant to the case about them - but not to just make the person look bad. As the rule says, the evidence must be relevant to something like "motive, opportunity, intent, preparation, plan, knowledge, identity, absence of mistake, or lack of accident."

The rationale behind this makes sense. Imagine a person who isn't allowed to have a gun is found with a gun in his coat. If he knew it was a gun, that would be illegal. If his defense was that he didn't know what the heavy lump of metal in his coat was and it was just an innocent mistake ("My crazy friends do the darnest things!"), you could see why it would be fair to introduce evidence that he'd had a gun in that coat before, which would make the jury think this is less likely to be a mistake.

Similarly, if a person was convicted of breaking into houses and leaving a DVD of Exit Through the Gift Shop behind, then, later, is on trial for breaking into a house where a copy of Exit Through the Gift Shop was left, you could see how the prior burglaries would be relevant at a trial for the later one.

On the other hand, the rule is ripe for abuse. I had a case where a gun was found in a coat and we were arguing it wasn't our client's coat. He had a prior conviction that involved the use of a pellet gun in an assault. The government argued that the prior pellet gun assault should be admitted under Rule 404(b). Though I still, to this day, do not understand how that's allowable under the rules, the court let the evidence about the prior pellet gun assault into evidence.

And, the government can't introduce evidence under 404(b) if the prejudice that comes from telling the jury about a person's prior bad behavior outweighs the advantages to telling the jury in its quest for the truth. This is contained in Rule 403.

Sometimes, telling people the bad things a person has done, will just make the person look really bad.

In Mr. Clay's case, the government introduced evidence that Mr. Clay previously drove up to a woman, who was 15 years old at the time, and told her to get in his car. When she didn't, he got out of the car and hit her in the face with a gun.

The woman herself testified, and told the jury that she thought she was going to die that day. It isn't hard to imagine that this was powerful evidence.

The government introduced this evidence, presumably, so the jury would know that Mr. Clay knows what it means to hurt someone near a car.

Mr. Clay was convicted, and sentenced to thirty years in prison.

He appealed the 404(b) ruling.

The Sixth Circuit court of appeals, in United States v. Clay, reversed. The appellate court found that the evidence of Mr. Clay's assault on the 15 year old didn't have enough to with his carjacking charge to be admissible. The court held,

the government argues that the assault is admissible to prove specific intent because it shows that Clay could develop the intent to cause serious bodily harm to innocent strangers who resist his demands. Considering both the case law and the purposes of Rule 404(b), this sweeps too broadly and risks eroding the Rule's very purpose. It perches perilously close to proving specific intent by showing propensity, as it suggests that a person who engages in bad behavior toward another is likely to do so again. The two offenses at issue--assault and carjacking--are too unrelated and too far apart in time to be probative of whether Clay had the specific intent to do harm to White; they merely show the criminal character of Clay.

At the same time, the Sixth Circuit noted that this evidence was much more prejudicial than probative. The testimony about an assault on a 15 year old is virtually guaranteed to move a jury to think of Mr. Clay as a Very Bad Man. And it has almost nothing to do with whether he's the man in the white and red checked shirt who committed the carjacking.

On that basis, the Sixth Circuit reversed the conviction and remanded for a new trial.

This is a good case. It's hard to express how maddening it is to see the gulf between what Rule 404(b) says and the way it's applied. It's a lovely thing to see a court actually applying the plain language of 404(b).

Related Posts:

• The Government Can't Use An Expert To Launder A Smear Campaign At Trial According to the Ninth Circuit


• The Past Can Catch Up With You, Rule 404(b) and a New Trial In North Dakota

Medicare is a huge federal program. It's also a huge source of criminal liability for doctors and other health care providers, as they try to comply with the byzantine regulations for billing issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Take United States v. Jones as an example.

Statewide Physical Medical Group

Telandra Jones and Theddis Pearson started a health care company with a few other people. It was called Statewide Physical Medical Group. The state that it was wide was Mississippi.

Mr. Pearson was the CEO. Ms. Jones handled the billing remotely, from Dallas, Texas.

Statewide's patients were first evaluated by a doctor to see if they needed therapeutic exercise. If they did, and the doctor ordered it, Statewide would send a person to the patient's home.

The people who were sent were kinesiotherapists. These therapists provided care at the patient's home without a doctor present.

Medicare's Rules for Physician Supervision

The rub is that Medicare's billing regulations require that a doctor supervise a kinesiotherapists' work. And, for Medicare billing, while, "supervise" doesn't mean that the doctor is in the same room, it generally means that the doctor is in the same building and can come in and help if need be.

If that's the definition, then Statewide's kinesiotherapists were not supervised by physicians.

So, it looks like the therapeutic work that Statewide submitted bills for did not comply with the Medicare billing regulations. Which is a pleasant way of saying that Statewide's bills may have been fraudulent.

There was one saving possibility for Statewide's billing practices - there is an exception to the direct supervision rule for people in certain kinds of underserved areas and for home treatments with other kinds of home health benefits under Medicare had been exhausted. If this exception applied, then there was an exception to the physician supervision requirement. If there was an exception to the physician supervision requirement, then there was no Medicare fraud!

Ms. Jones and Mr. Pearson relied on this provision.

At trial, the government presented evidence that the Statewide's interpretation was untenable, in the form of an expert about Medicare billing.

It looked like maybe Statewide has an argument there. The trouble, however, was that Statewide billed more for the task than for the amount of time it spent.

The government's Medicare billing expert explained to the jury that Statewide's billing practices caused treatments that took an hour to be billed as taking ten hours.

That's never going to look good to a jury.

Who Knew What When

The question then, turned on whether Ms. Jones and Mr. Pearson knew that they were submitting fraudulent bills. The process for sending bills in was a little complicated. First a secretary in an office - there were seven - would collect the therapists' treatment records and enter that data into a billing sheet.

The therapists did not keep records of how much time they spent, just what treatments they performed.

These billing sheets were then sent to Ms. Jones in Dallas, who turned them into bills to Medicare, based on the part of the body that was treated, instead of the amount of time that the treatment took.

Mr. Pearson was the CEO and generally managed the day-to-day affairs of the company, including its billing systems.

The Medicare Fraud Indictment

Mr. Pearson and Ms. Jones were charged with conspiracy to commit Medicare Fraud, Medicare Fraud, theft of government funds, health care false statements, and money laundering.

The jury convicted Ms. Jones because she was the one who submitted these bills to Medicare. There was evidence that Mr. Pearson was in the weeds with the business - he was convicted for also having the requisite knowledge.

Mr. Pearson was convicted of making false statements relating to health care. Both Mr. Pearson and Ms. Jones were convicted of theft of government property and health care fraud.

The Jury Verdict Form

To make a false statement in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1035, a person has to make the false statement knowingly and willfully." It isn't enough if the person makes a mistake and submits false information - the statement has to be a lie.

So, we don't send people who make math errors to prison. It's only if the math errors are made on purpose - so they aren't really math errors, as such - that the person makes the willfully false statement.

In Mr. Pearson's case, the jury verdict form did not use the legal standard for what the person charged with the crime had to know from section 1035. Rather, the jury was told that they could convict if they found that Mr. Pearson

"knew, or should have known, that the services billed by [Statewide], were not provided by a physician or under the direct supervision of a physician, as required by Medicare."

This jury instruction is much weaker than what the statute requires. If a person "should have known" that 2+2=4, but puts 5 when adding 2 twice, she meets this standard. And that's not what section 1035 allows.

As a result, Mr. Pearson's conviction was reversed and sent back for a new trial.

Related Posts:

• The Eighth Circuit Holds that Health Care Kickbacks Are Different Than Fraud


• How Not To Respond To A Grand Jury Subpoena

Imagine the following facts - a man is accused of a crime. The government introduces testimony from a scientist about testing of an item recovered by the police.

The scientist isn't the one who tested the evidence - he works in the same lab as the woman who did the tests. The scientist has read the lab reports from the woman who did the tests. He testifies that the item is what the government says it is. Moreover, because he knows how chain-of-custody is handled in his office, he testifies that the item that was tested is the same one that was taken off the person accused of a crime.

The defendant never has a chance to cross-examine the person who actually tested the item - the results of the test come into evidence through the testimony of the person who just read the reports of the testing.

Is that ok?

The Confrontation Clause

The Sixth Amendment says that "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right . . . to be confronted with the witnesses against him."

Recent Supreme Court cases - notably Crawford v. Washington, Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts, and Bullcoming v. New Mexico - have construed the Sixth Amendment to mean that if a person is offering "testimonial" evidence against another person in a criminal trial, that person has to appear at trial and be cross-examined.

Exactly what "testimonial" means is being worked out, but it's something like "evidence that was prepared with litigation in mind."

So, for our hypothetical above, the scientist's testimony is testimonial.[FN1]

So, under recent Confrontation Clause jurisprudence, is the scientist's testimony consistent with the Confrontation Clause?

The answer - it depends on whether the trial took place in the First Circuit or the Fourth Circuit.

The First Circuit

The First Circuit recently decided United States v. Ramos-Gonzalez. In that opinion, the court held that such testimony would not be permissible - the court of appeals held that,

Where an expert witness employs her training and experience to forge an independent conclusion, albeit on the basis of inadmissible evidence, the likelihood of a Sixth Amendment infraction is minimal. Where an expert acts merely as a well-credentialed conduit for testimonial hearsay, however, the cases hold that her testimony violates a criminal defendant's right to confrontation. In this case, we need not wade too deeply into the thicket, because the testimony at issue here does not reside in the middle ground. [internal citations omitted]

The scientist's report in the First Circuit is merely reciting what the other person in the lab did. It is, therefore, merely a blanket repeating of the other person's work.

The First Circuit then reversed and remanded Mr. Ramos-Gonzales' conviction.

The Fourth Circuit

In United States v. Summers, though, the Fourth Circuit took a different approach.

There, because the expert talked about how to interpret the data compiled by the unavailable person who did the testing, the Fourth Circuit found that the evidence passed constitutional muster.

The Lesson

The lesson in all of this? If you are a prosecutor, you have a better chance of maintaining a conviction on appeal if you have your expert talk about something in addition to the report, after mentioning the results of another scientist's testing.

[FN1] - depending on the kind of equipment that's used in the testing, you could see an argument that it isn't. Right now, let's leave that aside - assume that the evidence is testimonial.

In a classic Simpsons episode, Homer Simpson, as a young person, is excluded from a club of his peers - the club is called the "No Homers Club." Homer complains, noting that there was a Homer inside the clubhouse.

He's told - "It says no Homers. We're allowed to have one." (Incidentally, the "No Homers Club" is now the name of many Simpsons fan clubs).

Club rules tend, I think, to be silly. The Seventh Circuit's recent opinion in United States v. Loughry however, meant the difference in whether a child pornography conviction stands can depend on the rules of a private "club."

Robert Loughry was accused of being an administrator of an online club that had very rigid rules. The club, called the "Cache," existed to allow users access to a particular kind of child pornography. Other kinds were explicitly prohibited.

As the Seventh Circuit explained it,

Only "lascivious exhibition" pornography, which included the exhibition of girls' genitals, was permitted on the Cache. Images depicting sexual contact or other sexually explicit material were prohibited.

Mr. Loughry was accused of distribution of child pornography, advertising child pornography, and related conspiracy counts. He was not accused of possession of child pornography.

The government introduced evidence of the images found at the Cache. As the Seventh Circuit explained,

The site was divided into sub-forums and topic areas. There was a non-nude gallery area and a nude gallery area, which was subdivided by ages into "18 and over nude," "13-18 nude," and "under 13 nude" categories. The Cache's rules prohibited posting any images depicting sexual contact, masturbation, penetration, boys, or men. According to several witnesses, the purpose of the Cache was to provide its members with access to child pornography consisting of the lascivious exhibition of the genitals of minor girls.

During the trial, the government introduced evidence of Mr. Loughry exercising the kind of role in the Cache that one would expect an administrator to exercise - he promoted members, he kicked them out, and he created new member accounts.

The last government witness, though, introduced evidence of significant hard-core child pornography found on Mr. Loughry's computer. It was the kind of child pornography that would not have been allowed in the Cache. It's described in the opinion, if you want to know more.

Mr. Loughry was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

On appeal, he challenged the district court's decision to admit the hard-core child pornography from his computer as unduly prejudicial under Rule 403 of the Federal Rules of Evidence. Again, keep in mind that Mr. Loughry was not charged with the crime of possessing the hard-core child pornography on his computer.

The court of appeals took the district court to task for not looking at the hard-core child pornography before ruling on the admissibility question. Because the trial judge didn't look at that evidence, the court of appeals reasoned, that judge couldn't have made an informed decision about how prejudicial it was.

As the court of appeals said it,

The challenged videos include the kind of highly reprehensible and offensive content that might lead a jury to convict because it thinks that the defendant is a bad person and deserves punishment, regardless of whether the defendant committed the charged crime. Given the inflammatory nature of the evidence, the district court needed to know what was in the photographs and videos in order for it to properly exercise its discretion under Rule 403. Without looking at the videos for itself, the court could not have fully assessed the potential prejudice to Loughry and weighed it against the evidence's probative value.

Describing the kind of hard core child pornography that was shown, the court of appeals determined that it was prejudicial - and that the prejudice outweighed the value of admitting it, noting,

Such displays have a strong tendency to produce intense disgust.

The Seventh Circuit then found that the judge's error was not harmless, and reversed and remanded the case.

Child pornography cases are hard, and it is challenging to make the kinds of distinctions that the Seventh Circuit made here. Good on them for doing this work though, even though it's hard.

It has been a good year for defendants and the Interstate Agreement on Detainers.

A few months ago, the First Circuit held that the government cannot request a writ from a district court to bring a person in state custody to federal custody if they have already requested the person's transfer under the Interstate Agreement on Detainers - after the governor of the state told them that he was denying the federal request.

Now, the Sixth Circuit* orders that an indictment be dismissed with prejudice under the Sixth Amendment's Speedy Trial guarantee because the government botched a request under the Interstate Agreement on Detainers. The case is United States v. Ferreira.

Mr. Ferreira was detained in a state institution in Bartow County, Georgia on September 13, 2005. That very same day he was indicted in federal court in Tennessee for conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine.

The federal prosecutor asked the district court for a writ directing Mr. Ferreira to be brought to federal court on October 19.

On October 12, the government brought a superseding indictment against Mr. Ferreira and, again, requested a writ for his appearance on October 21. On October 21, the district court granted the requested writ. (it isn't clear what happened with the October 12 writ request).

Though, earlier, the U.S. Marshals service told the U.S. Attorney's Office that Mr. Ferreira had been moved to facilities in Cobb County, Georgia ("Low on taxes, Big on business"). The U.S. Attorney's Office "misplaced" this notification. The writ was directed to Bartow County.

Though the opinion doesn't say it, one can presume that Bartow County did just about exactly nothing when given a writ for a person who was not in their custody.

The U.S. Marshals service lodged detainers on Mr. Ferreira.

Time passed.

Two years later, on September 6, 2007, Mr. Ferreira filed a motion for appointment of counsel and asked for a Speedy Trial.

More time passed.

In July 2008, Mr. Ferreira filed, on his own, a motion to dismiss the indictment for speedy trial violations.**

Later that month, the U.S. Attorney's Office filed another request for a writ to have him brought to federal court. This one was successful - he was brought, received a lawyer, and his lawyer moved to dismiss the indictment. The government conceded that it did not comply with the Interstate Agreement on Detainers.

Happily, the district court granted the motion to dismiss. Unhappily for Mr. Ferreira, it did so without prejudice - meaning he could be reindicted.

He was, and pled guilty with the ability to raise the Speedy Trial issues.

The Sixth Circuit found that Mr. Ferreira's constitutional Speedy Trial rights were violated. Some of the reasons caused no trouble for the court - the court of appeals found that he clearly wanted a speedy trial, the government's conduct in delaying when he came into federal court was the result of gross negligence, and the delay was meaningful.

The only real question was whether Mr. Ferreira was prejudiced. Here, the court of appeals found that his ability to develop a defense was compromised without him having to articulate a specific way in which that ability suffered.

The court held that:

He argues on appeal, as he did in the district court, that the passage of time generally impaired his defense by causing the evidence to go stale. The Sixth Circuit has recognized that "extreme" delays may, on their own, "give rise to a strong presumption of evidentiary . . . "When a defendant is unable to articulate the harm caused by delay, the reason for the delay . . . will be used to determine whether the defendant was presumptively prejudiced." United States v. Mundt, 29 F.3d 233, 236 (6th Cir. 1994). Where the delay has been caused by negligence, "our toleration of such negligence varies inversely with its protractedness." Doggett, 505 U.S. at 657.

Thus, even though Mr. Ferreira was unable to point to a particular thing that would have been better for his defense if he'd been brought into federal court sooner, because the delay was caused by the government and was lengthy, he didn't have to.

* The only Circuit without an RSS feed for its opinions.

** A detainer can seriously mess someone in custody up. They lose the right to many privileges and programs in custody, including an ability to get work release or even early release. Folks in prison have a many legitimate reasons to want to get out from under a detainer.

It's bad-government-conduct-in-a-drug-border-crossing-case-from-the-Ninth-Circuit week here at the Federal Criminal Appeals blog. Yesterday, we blogged about the government's argument that psychiatrists are qualified to read law enforcement records.

Today, we deal with the Ninth Circuit's opinion in United States v. Sanchez.

Mr. Sanchez crossed the border from Mexico with 64 pounds of cocaine in his car, a 2002 Passat. A customs officer, suspicious of the car's German practicality, waived Mr. Sanchez to secondary inspection. A drug dog alerted to the car. The cocaine was found.

Mr. Sanchez was questioned by Customs agents. Mr. Sanchez said that he was afraid of the people who gave him the drugs to carry across the border. Mr. Sanchez asked the agent to help him because his family was in Mexico. The agent asked Mr. Sanchez for help finding the people who gave him the drugs. Mr. Sanchez asked if he could call his family. The agent allowed him to try to call, but the call did not go through.

Mr. Sanchez was indicted for importing and possessing cocaine.

At trial, Mr. Sanchez argued that he was worried his family would be hurt if he didn't transport the drugs. He testified in his defense, and explained that he is a U.S. citizen who lived with his wife and children in Mexico. He was looking for work as a carpenter, when drug traffickers approached him. He refused.

The drug traffickers came back to him. They explained that they thought he would be a particularly effective courier since he was a U.S. citizen. They became more threatening. Mr. Sanchez explained that he was afraid that they would hurt his family. Finally, reluctantly, he agreed.

The government made its closing argument. Mr. Sanchez's lawyer then made their closing argument. Sanchez's lawyer argued that Mr. Sanchez was forced to import the drugs - that he was under duress when he agreed to take the drugs into the United States. For that reason, his lawyer argued, Mr. Sanchez should not be convicted of importing the cocaine.

The prosecutor gave his rebuttal argument.* Mocking Mr. Sanchez, he argued,

[W]hy don't we send a memo to all drug traffickers, to all persons south of the border and in Imperial County and in California--why not our nation while we're at it. Send a memo to them and say dear drug traffickers, when you hire someone to drive a load, tell them that they were forced to do it. Because even if they don't say it at primary and secondary, they'll get away with it if they just say their family was threatened. Because they don't trust Mexican police, and they don't think that the U.S. authorities can help them. Why don't we do that?

The implication, in case it isn't clear, is that we should not really send a memo to drug traffickers, and that to acquit Mr. Sanchez was tantamount to drafting such a memorandum.

Mr. Sanchez's lawyer did not object to the prosecutor's "send a memo" argument. Until the appeal.

The law is clear that a prosecutor cannot argue that a person should be convicted to prevent larger societal ills, or to deter future lawlessness, or to take a stand for community values. A federal criminal trial is supposed to be about whether the person on trial committed the crime charged - not whether society is on a downward spiral.

The government argued to the Ninth Circuit that "send a memo" is just a fancy way to argue that Mr. Sanchez's position was unreasonable (to parrot Fancy Nancy).

The Ninth Circuit thought that there are less fancy and problematic ways of making that point, and that a government lawyer has an obligation to avoid making illegal arguments in closing.

Even though Mr. Sanchez's lawyer failed to object, the Ninth Circuit found the "send a memo" argument so out of bounds that it vacated the conviction and remanded. That's a fancy way of saying Mr. Sanchez gets a new trial.

* Yes, in a federal criminal case, the prosecutor gets the first and the last word.

Sometimes, a case comes along, and you wonder if the government is even trying to be fair.

Brad Santini drove from Mexico into California. He had 28 kilograms of marijuana hidden in his car. It was found. He was charged and went to trial.

At trial, Mr. Santini's lawyers argued that he may have been tricked into driving the car across the border after someone else hid the marijuana in it without his knowledge.

To buttress this argument, Mr. Santini's counsel presented evidence that Mr. Santini had suffered a traumatic brain injury three years before his ill-fated border crossing. The defense called a clinical psychologist to testify as an expert that Mr. Santini had "permanent social defects" and that his kind of brain injury can leave people with difficulty with "social perception of other people."

Because Mr. Santini had these permanent social defects, he was easier to trick, the defense argued.

The government also called a mental health professional - a psychiatrist named Dr. Kalish. Dr. Kalish's testing consisted, apparently, of a criminal background check. You know, the kind they routinely teach psychiatrists to do during a residency.

Dr. Kalish reviewed Mr. Santini's rap sheet. He noticed that Mr. Santini had "extensive law enforcement contacts" before his injury in 2005. Because of that, the government psychiatrist concluded, Mr. Santini didn't change after 2005 because after 2005 he had the regrettable border crossing. So, because there were law enforcement contacts before the injury and after the injury, the injury didn't affect his social perceptions.

As a matter of clear thinking this is suspect - surely not everything changes in a person after a brain injury. Mr. Santini may have been a Baltimore Ravens fan before his injury and after his injury as well, but it doesn't mean that the injury didn't have an effect on him. One would think, instead, that a psychiatrist would do some kind of mental health or function evaluation and base his conclusion on that.

In any event, the government was allowed to use its expert to introduce this testimony about Mr. Santini's "extensive prior law enforcement contacts." Mr. Santini was convicted at trial.

In United States v. Santini, the Ninth Circuit reversed, based solely on the decision to let the jury hear about Dr. Kalish's testimony about Mr. Santini's prior law enforcement contacts.

The court of appeals noted that this evidence was highly prejudicial and way outside of a psychiatrist's area of expertise. The testimony was based, not on convictions, but on "contacts." As the court of appeals noted,

For the reasons outlined above, the rap sheet was not sufficient to form the basis of Dr. Kalish's opinion that Santini had engaged in "similar" criminal behavior prior to his brain injury. An expert in one field (Dr. Kalish was a psychiatrist) cannot express an opinion relying on data that requires expertise in another field (here, a rap sheet that would require interpretation by an expert in law enforcement record-keeping).

The evidence was not admissible under Rule 404(b). It was prejudicial, so barred by Rule 403. And it was outside of Dr. Kalish's expertise, so not allowed under Rule 702.

Because the government cannot use an expert to introduce any evidence that smears a defendant whenever it can find an expert to articulate a questionable theory of quasi-scientific relevance, the Ninth Circuit vacated Mr. Santini's conviction and remanded the case for a new trial.

One of the trickiest problems in a criminal trial, in federal court or any other court, is determining if the person accused of a crime should testify.

On one hand, the jurors instinctively want to hear what the person has to say. They're instructed not to hold it against him if he doesn't testify, but, as a matter of human psychology, people want the guy who just sat and listened to others say bad things about him to say something back.

And, of course, the person on trial may have something useful to say in his own defense.

On the other hand, if the person has a criminal record, by testifying the government can often introduce that criminal history to the jury - if it wasn't already presented.

Worse, in federal court, a person who testifies and is convicted runs the risk of being assessed a two-level increase for obstruction of justice under U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1.

Doesn't that violate a person's right to testify in their own defense? you may wonder. As it happens, the Supreme Court heard an argument to that effect - and rejected it - in United States v. Dunnigan.

The Court acknowledged that in prior precedents

we indicated that the ordinary task of trial courts is to sift true from false testimony, so the problem caused by simple perjury was not so much an obstruction of justice as an expected part of its administration

Nonetheless, because section 3C1.1 does not apply to every defendant who testifies and is convicted, the Supreme Court held that section 3C1.1 passes constitutional muster and does not unduly infringe on a person's right to testify in his defense.

The obstruction enhancement was at issue in the Fourth Circuit's opinion in United States v. Perez.

In Perez, the person on trial testified in his own defense. He was convicted. At sentencing, the district court determined that the two-level bump under 3C1.1 applied because:

[T]he fact remains that the jury decided this matter unfavorably toward Mr. Perez. . . . the Court agrees that the government witnesses were more credible, from the Court's perspective, than was Mr. Perez . . . The Court believes that the jury reasonably accepted testimony of the government witnesses, rejected that of Mr. Perez and the Court believes that Mr. Perez's testimony at trial was not credible and constituted obstruction of justice.

The Fourth Circuit used Perez as an opportunity to discuss what a sentencing court has to find in order to impose an adjustment under 3C1.1. Mindful that the Supreme Court requires that the enhancement not apply in every case where a person testified and was convicted, the Fourth Circuit clarified that 3C1.1 only applies when the person on trial:

"(1) gave false testimony; (2) concerning a material matter; (3) with willful intent to deceive"

The Fourth Circuit, though, seemed troubled by how easy it can be for a sentencing court to impose this enhancement. For that reason, the Fourth Circuit now requires that a district court

must provide a finding that clearly establishes each of the three elements. With respect to willfulness, for example, it would, in the usual case, be enough for the court to say, "The defendant knew that his testimony was false when he gave it," but it could not simply assert, "The third element is satisfied." While some may suggest this is little more than an empty formality, we believe it serves a vital purpose.

Because the district court in Perez did not do this factfinding, the court of appeals reversed and remanded for a new sentencing hearing.