Tag Archives: vicinage

Think Global, Indict Local – Update for January 4, 2024

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

CRIMINAL CASE VENUE MEANS SOMETHING

Former Congressman Jeff Fortenberry (R-NE) was investigated for a $30,000 illegal campaign contribution funneled to him at a 2016 Los Angeles fundraiser. Two years later, the FBI – which had been running the investigation from its Los Angeles office – had a cooperating witness call Jeff with an FBI agent secretly listening in to tell him that a Nigerian businessman was probably the source of a $30,000 donation that Jeff had gotten at the fundraiser.

nigerianprince240104After that, two Los Angeles-based FBI agents went to Lincoln, Nebraska, to interview Jeff. He denied anyone had ever told him about any illegal foreign contributions to his campaign. Jeff was later interviewed again in his Washington, DC, office, and again denied having been told that any campaign contributions were illegal.

In October 2019, Jeff was charged with three counts related to making false statements to federal investigators. He was convicted by a jury in 2021 and promptly resigned from Congress. In June 2022, he was sentenced to two years’ probation, community service, and a $25,000 fine.

Santa came late for Jeff, but the jolly old elf arrived in a big way. The day after Christmas, the 9th Circuit reversed Jeff’s convictions for lack of venue.

“Questions of venue in criminal cases… are not merely matters of formal legal procedure,” the Circuit said. “They present policy concerns deeply rooted in the Constitution. Article III, sec 2, cl. 3, requires that the ‘trial of all Crimes… shall be held in the State where the… Crimes shall have been committed… This command is reinforced by the Vicinage Clause of the 6th Amendment, which “guarantees ‘the right to… an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

The government admitted that Jeff had lied to them in Nebraska and Washington, DC, but claimed that his lies affected an investigation in California, so venue in California’s Central District was proper. The 9th disagreed.

To determine the locus delicti – the location of the crime – the Circuit said, “We look to the essential conduct elements of the offense.” Under 18 USC § 1001, which criminalizes “knowingly and willfully… making any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation,” the essential conduct of the offense is the making of a false statement. Section 1001(a)(2) “does not contain a venue clause, nor is there any language suggesting any ‘essential conduct element’ other than making a false statement,” the 9th said. “It is the act of uttering a false statement that is the criminal behavior essential to liability” under § 1001.

venue240104The Circuit agreed that while the government had to prove materiality, that fact was irrelevant to determining venue. The venue inquiry instead “turns on the action by the defendant that is essential to the offense, and where that specific action took place,” the appellate court held. “Materiality is not conduct because it does not require anything to actually happen. We have previously held that materiality requires only that a statement must have the capacity to influence a federal agency…In other words, the “test is the intrinsic capabilities of the false statement itself, rather than the possibility of the actual attainment of its end as measured by collateral circumstances.”

Jeff is not out of the woods, but the government will have to decide whether it wants to retry him in Nebraska or Washington, DC, where it will have to enlist the interest of the U.S. Attorney in either of those venues to expend resources on a case that will end in probation for a guy who is already a few years out of politics and the headlines.

United States v. Fortenberry, Case No. 22-50144, 2023 U.S.App. LEXIS 34167 (9th Cir. December 26, 2023)

– Thomas L. Root

Supremes Hold Venue Violation Permits a Retrial – Update for June 16, 2023

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

NOW IT’S TIME FOR DOUBLE JEOPARDY…

doublejeopardy230616Tim Smith was a hacker, code cracker, slacker... When he wasn’t hanging out with all the chatroom yakkers, the southern Alabama man liked to fish and dive in the Gulf of Mexico.

Blending his computer savvy with his angler hobby, Tim was able to hack the geographic coordinates of artificial reefs in the Gulf of Mexico from StrikeLines, an Orlando, Florida, company that sold the data to people looking for the best places to fish. Tim – who thought that StrikeLines was morally wrong to capitalize on the work of the people who built the reefs by selling their locations – made the stolen data freely available on the Internet and offered to help StrikeLines patch its website vulnerability in exchange for some data he had been unable to extract from the site about a few great deep locations for catching grouper.

Or so the Northern District of Florida jury found, holding that Tim was guilty of violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 USC § 1030(a)(2)(C) and (c)(2)(B)(iii), for intentionally accessing a computer without authorization; for theft of trade secrets in violation of 18 USC § 1832(a)(1), and for transmitting a threat through interstate commerce with intent to extort a thing of value in violation of 18 USC § 875(d). The judge gave him 18 months.

venue230616But Tim fought back. Before trial, he argued the indictment had to be dismissed for lack of venue, citing the Constitution’s Venue Clause (Article III, § 2, clause 3), and the 6th Amendment’s Vicinage Clause. He argued that his trial in the Northern District of Florida was improper because he had accessed StrikeLines’ website from his home in the Southern District of Alabama and the servers storing StrikeLines’ data were located in the Middle District of Florida.

The judge kicked the venue question to the jury, which found that because the effects of Tim’s crime were felt at StrikeLines’ headquarters in the Northern District of Florida, venue was proper. On appeal, the 11th Circuit disagreed, holding that venue in the Northern District of Florida was improper.

But Tim’s victory was short-lived because the Circuit said Tim could be re-prosecuted in the right venue.

Tim took that issue to the Supreme Court, which yesterday agreed in a unanimous opinion that even when a venue issue is decided incorrectly by the jury, that fact does not implicate double jeopardy. Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion observed that the usual remedy for error was a new trial rather than complete dismissal of the case. The only exception the court had recognized to that rule, Alito noted, was the violation of the right to a speedy trial, which SCOTUSBlog said the court previously has categorized as “‘generically different,’ presumably because a delayed trial is hardly remedied by one still further delayed.”

Venue in a criminal trial is a procedural issue with a constitutional dimension. The Venue Clause is keyed to the location of the alleged crime, not the district where the accused resides or even the district in which he or she is located at the time of committing the crime. Thus, as the Supreme Court puts it, “the Clause does not allow variation for convenience of the accused.”

The Vicinage Clause guarantees the right to an impartial jury made up of people from the state and district “wherein the crime shall have been committed.” The Vicinage Clause “reinforces” the coverage of the Venue Clause because, in protecting the right to a jury drawn from the place where a crime occurred, it essentially mandates where a trial must be held.

The Supreme Court said a judicial decision on venue is “fundamentally different” from a jury’s general verdict of acquittal. When a jury returns a general verdict of not guilty, its decision cannot be upset by judicial speculation or inquiry into why the jury did what it did. “To conclude otherwise,” the Court said, “would impermissibly authorize judges to usurp the jury right.” Because a trial court cannot be certain about a jury’s basis for a ‘not guilty’ verdict without improperly delving into the jurors’ deliberations, “the jury holds an unreviewable power to return a verdict of not guilty even for impermissible reasons.”

innocent161024A defendant’s culpability is the touchstone for determining whether retrial is permitted under the 5th Amendment’s Double Jeopardy Clause. When a trial ends with a finding that the defendant’s criminal culpability had not been established, retrial is prohibited. Conversely, “retrial is permissible when a trial terminates on a basis unrelated to factual guilt or innocence of the offense of which the defendant is accused.” For example, the Double Jeopardy Clause is not triggered when a trial ends in juror deadlock, or with a judgment dismissing charges because of a procedural issue like preindictment delay. “In these circumstances,” the Court held, “the termination of proceedings is perfectly consistent with the possibility that the defendant is guilty of the charged offense.

The vicinage right is only one aspect of the jury-trial rights protected by the 6th Amendment, the Court said. Retrials are the appropriate remedy for violations of other jury-trial rights. “The reversal of a conviction based on a violation of the Venue or Vicinage Clauses, even when styled as a ‘judgment of acquittal’ under Rule 29, plainly does not resolve ‘the bottom-line question of ‘criminal culpability’,” the Court said. “In this case, then, the 11th Circuit’s decision that venue in the Northern District of Florida was improper did not adjudicate Smith’s culpability… [and] thus does not trigger the Double Jeopardy Clause.”

Smith v. United States, Case No. 21-1576, 2023 U.S. LEXIS 2546, at *24-25 (June 15, 2023)

SCOTUSBlog.com, Unanimous court holds that the remedy for a venue error is retrial (June 15, 2023)

– Thomas L. Root

Stranger in a Strange Land – Update for October 13, 2022

We post news and comment on federal criminal justice issues, focused primarily on trial and post-conviction matters, legislative initiatives, and sentencing issues.

3RD CIRCUIT HOLDS THAT COLORABLE 2255 CLAIMS DEMAND A HEARING

burr221013Venue isn’t a very big deal in federal civil cases. But venue in a criminal trial – the right to be tried “in the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed” – is a 6th Amendment requirement so basic that it has its own jargon: vicinage.

And that makes sense. Just ask Aaron Burr. He got hauled all the way from Louisiana to stand trial in Richmond, Virginia, far from where the offense occurred and witnesses were located.  

Even now, criminal venue can get short shrift.  I once had a Philadelphia lawyer – who had just left the U.S. Attorney’s office – tell me over coffee that lack of venue in an indictment was no big deal because the issue was easily waived and hardly mattered anyway.  

He was wrong.

Dave and Judy Haisten ran a diversified business, selling misbranded pesticides and animal drugs, as well as a variety of counterfeit goods (which included DVDs). They sold some of the pesticides in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The DVDs, however, were seized by customs officials in Cincinnati en route to the Haistens’ South Carolina home.

Dave and Judy were convicted in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on 14 charges, including two counts of trafficking in counterfeit DVDs. They each got 12 months’ concurrent imprisonment on the first twelve counts (relating to pesticides and animal drugs). However, Dave got 78 months on the two DVD counts, concurrent with the other 12 counts (for a total sentence of 78 months). Judy got 60 months on her DVD counts, all running concurrently.

The Haistens believed that where the DVDs were concerned, they were strangers to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.  They argued that venue for the DVD counts only existed in Ohio – where the shipment was intercepted – or South Carolina, where they kept their stash of counterfeit DVDs. But their trial attorney did not request a jury instruction on improper venue or move for acquittal on the DVD counts for lack of proper venue in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

bartsimpson221013The Haistens ultimately filed a joint § 2255 motion, arguing that their lawyer had been ineffective for failing to challenge venue on the DVD counts. The U.S. Attorney’s opposition to their § 2255 motion followed the typical government script: (1) the lawyer did not screw up; (2) the lawyer’s screw-up was done for strategic reasons; and (3) the lawyer’s screw-up did not prejudice the defendants.

The District Court denied Dave and Judy’s § 2255 motion, holding that any venue argument by their lawyer would have been futile because the government had proved venue for the DVD counts, based on a spreadsheet offered by the government that showed the Haistens had sent five DVDs to customers in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Neither the government nor the district court obtained a declaration from the Haistens’ lawyer as to why he did not argue venue.

Last week, the 3rd Circuit reversed the denial, and sent the case back to the district court for an evidentiary hearing. In so doing, the Court of Appeals provided a refreshing reminder that the standard for entitlement to an evidentiary hearing is to be kept low. 

On appeal, the government finally admitted that there was no venue for the DVD counts, because the seized DVDs at issue in those counts were not actually involved in sales to Eastern District of Pennsylvania customers. It argued nevertheless that their lawyer had a strategic reason for not raising venue, and anyway, Dave and Judy could not prove that their sentences would have changed.

The Circuit admitted that an attorney’s performance is not deficient if it is the product of a strategic litigation choice. But, it noted, “a district court must hold a hearing unless the motion and the files and records of the case conclusively show that the prisoner is entitled to no relief… If a claim, when taken as true and evaluated in light of the existing record, states a colorable claim for relief… then further factual development in the form of a hearing is required.”

strategy221013The 3rd ruled that “colorable legal merit is distinct from actual merit. The threshold for a habeas petitioner’s claim to be colorable is low. The bottom line is, given the lack of evidence in the record about trial counsel’s strategic reasons for failing to object to improper venue on [the DVD counts], it is inconclusive whether the Haistens’ trial counsel performed deficiently. And while we take no definitive position on the merits of the Haistens’ arguments on the prejudice prong, their theory that they are prejudiced by having additional, improperly imposed felony convictions on their record is not so conclusively meritless as to have justified denying them a hearing.”

United States v. Haisten, Case No 21-1421, 2022 U.S.App.LEXIS 27771 (3d Cir., Oct. 5, 2022)

– Thomas L. Root