Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caDC-17-03091/USCOURTS-caDC-17-03091-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Jose Emanuel Garcia Sota
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued December 16, 2019 Decided January 21, 2020 

No. 17-3091 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

APPELLEE

v. 

JOSE EMANUEL GARCIA SOTA, ALSO KNOWN AS JUAN MANUEL 

MALDONADO AMEZCUA, ALSO KNOWN AS ZAFADO, ALSO 

KNOWN AS SAFADO, 

APPELLANT

Consolidated with 17-3092 

Appeals from the United States District Court 

for the District of Columbia 

(No. 1:13-cr-00142-1) 

(No. 1:13-cr-00143-1) 

Matthew B. Kaplan, appointed by the court, argued the 

cause for appellants. With him on the briefs was Elita C. 

Amato. 

John M. Pellettieri, Attorney, U.S. Department of Justice, 

argued the cause for appellee. With him on the brief were 

Jessie K. Liu, U.S. Attorney, and Karen P.W. Seifert, Assistant 

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U.S. Attorney. Elizabeth Trosman, Assistant U.S. Attorney, 

entered an appearance. 

Before: WILKINS, Circuit Judge, and WILLIAMS and 

SENTELLE, Senior Circuit Judges. 

Opinion for the Court filed by Senior Circuit Judge

WILLIAMS. 

WILLIAMS, Senior Circuit Judge: According to a 

longstanding canon of statutory interpretation, our courts 

presume that American laws do not apply outside of the United 

States—unless Congress directs otherwise. Here two criminal 

defendants attacked a pair of American law enforcement 

officers in Mexico, killing one and wounding the other; they 

now argue that the canon requires us to set aside three of the 

ensuing convictions for each defendant. 

After apprehension and extradition to the United States, 

the defendants stood trial in the District of Columbia, and a jury 

convicted each on four counts: two counts under 18 U.S.C. 

§ 1114, which criminalizes the killing of an officer or employee 

of the United States; one count under 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) for 

using a firearm while committing a crime of violence; and one 

count under 18 U.S.C. § 1116, which criminalizes the killing of 

certain persons protected under international law. In this 

appeal, the defendants argue that § 1114 and § 924(c) do not 

apply extraterritorially; they don’t contest their convictions 

under § 1116. 

The defendants are correct about § 1114, which has a 

purely domestic scope, but not about § 924(c), which can apply 

to conduct overseas. We thus vacate their convictions under 

§ 1114 and remand their cases for a limited resentencing. 

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* * * 

 In recent years the Supreme Court has applied the canon 

with increased clarity and insistence. See, e.g., RJR Nabisco, 

Inc. v. European Cmty., 136 S. Ct. 2090 (2016); Kiobel v. Royal 

Dutch Petroleum Co., 569 U.S. 108 (2013); Morrison v. Nat’l 

Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U.S. 247 (2010). The canon “rests on 

the perception that Congress ordinarily legislates with respect 

to domestic, not foreign, matters.” Morrison, 561 U.S. at 255. 

The presumption also “serves to avoid the international discord 

that can result when U.S. law is applied to conduct in foreign 

countries.” RJR Nabisco, 136 S. Ct. at 2100. 

But the presumption against extraterritorial application is 

just a presumption. It can be overcome when Congress “has 

affirmatively and unmistakably instructed that the statute will” 

apply abroad. Id. 

We address first 18 U.S.C. § 1114, then id. § 924(c), and 

finally a sentence enhancement under id. § 924(j)(1). 

1. Section 1114 provides for the punishment of anyone 

who 

. . . kills or attempts to kill any officer or employee of 

the United States or of any agency in any branch of 

the United States Government (including any member 

of the uniformed services) while such officer or 

employee is engaged in or on account of the 

performance of official duties . . . . 

18 U.S.C. § 1114. On its face, § 1114 does not speak to 

extraterritorial application one way or the other, thus leaving 

the presumption against extraterritoriality unrebutted. 

In a number of ways the context reinforces the case against 

extraterritorial application of § 1114. Nearby § 1116 

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criminalizes killing a U.S. officer or employee who is otherwise 

“entitled pursuant to international law to special protection 

against attack upon his person, freedom, or dignity.” Id. 

§ 1116(b)(4)(B). And § 1116 explicitly applies to conduct 

beyond our borders. See id. § 1116(c) (delineating the statute’s 

express extraterritorial scope). Here, as in United States v. 

Thompson, 921 F.3d 263, 266 (D.C. Cir. 2019), Congress’s 

explicit provision for extraterritorial jurisdiction in one 

provision (§ 1116) militates against inferring any such 

application for a closely related and nearby provision with no 

such signal (§ 1114). 

(In this case, one of the American law enforcement 

officers—Agent Victor Avila—possessed diplomatic status, 

entitling him to protection under § 1116. The other—Agent 

Jaime Zapata—was only stationed in Mexico temporarily and 

apparently did not have diplomatic status. Recall that the jury 

found both defendants guilty under § 1116 for the attempted 

killing of Avila.) 

Strengthening the inference from § 1116 against 

extraterritorial application of § 1114 is that Congress gave both 

provisions their current form in a single statute, the 

Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 

(“AEDPA”). See Pub. L. 104–132, 110 Stat 1214 (1996). 

Most notably, AEDPA revised the portion of § 1116 providing 

for § 1116’s extraterritorial application but inserted no similar 

provision into § 1114. See AEDPA §§ 721, 727. 

AEDPA also modified § 1114, but not, so far as we see, in 

a way that assists the government. Before AEDPA, § 1114 

contained a long list of discrete categories of protected U.S. 

agents working for dozens of U.S. agencies—the list occupies 

a column and a half of fine print in the United States Code. See 

18 U.S.C. § 1114 (1994). As a result of AEDPA, by contrast, 

§ 1114 generically protects “any officer or employee of the 

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United States or of any agency in any branch of the United 

States Government.” 18 U.S.C. § 1114; AEDPA § 727 

(amending § 1114 to its current form). The government 

correctly notes that some employees in some of the categories 

specifically protected under the pre-AEDPA § 1114 would 

have commonly been working overseas, specifically “any 

security officer of the Department of State or the Foreign 

Service.” The government would have us infer extraterritorial 

scope in the current, expanded and generalized version of 

§ 1114 from the old § 1114’s (supposedly obvious) 

extraterritorial applications. 

But it’s far from obvious that the innumerable categories 

used in the prior version of § 1114 covered a material number 

of individuals whose work would occur only (or even largely) 

overseas. Even security officers for the Department of State 

and Foreign Service perform quite a range of domestic tasks, as 

well as work overseas. See, e.g., History of the Bureau of 

Diplomatic Security of the United States Department of State

186, 209–12 (2011), https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/ 

organization/176589.pdf (describing role of security officers in 

protecting foreign dignitaries in the United States as well as the 

Secretary of State). Indeed, when Congress included the 

security officers in § 1114, it empowered the officers to arrest 

those who assaulted the foreign dignitaries the officers 

protected on U.S. soil, indicating congressional intent to 

legislate with respect to those officers’ domestic activities. See 

Pub. L. 88–493, 78 Stat 610 (1964). Much the same is true of 

those working for the “Intelligence Community,” another 

category of officers listed in the pre-AEDPA § 1114 who 

perform many domestic functions. Viewing it from the 

opposite perspective, we see that nearly all the categories of 

U.S. agents explicitly protected by the pre-AEDPA § 1114 

work exclusively or at least overwhelmingly within the United 

States (e.g., National Park Service officers and employees). 

Accordingly, we cannot see either the pre-AEDPA’s § 1114 

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protections for multiple separate categories of employees, nor 

AEDPA’s switch to generic terms, as conveying any direction 

to apply the statute to conduct overseas. 

Similarly, the government sees significance in current 

§ 1114’s parenthetical, “(including any member of the 

uniformed services).” 18 U.S.C. § 1114. But at the time 

Congress passed AEDPA, around 85% of U.S. military 

personnel were stationed at home, so we can’t infer anything 

from the group’s inclusion in § 1114. See Tim Kane, Global 

U.S. Troop Deployment, 1950-2005, Heritage Foundation 1 

(2006), https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/global-ustroop-deployment-1950-2005 (collecting Department of 

Defense data). 

The government rests primarily on United States v. 

Bowman, 260 U.S. 94 (1922). There the Supreme Court 

permitted the extraterritorial application of a statute outlawing 

conspiracy to defraud the government of the United States, 

including, under a recent amendment, a “corporation in which 

the United States of America is a stockholder.” The 

amendment clearly included the U.S. Shipping Board 

Emergency Fleet Corporation, the defendants’ victim, and was, 

the Court said, “evidently intended to protect” precisely that 

corporation, “in which the United States was the sole 

stockholder.” Id. at 101–02. 

The Court acknowledged the general rule that if a statute 

is intended to include offenses “committed out side of the strict 

territorial jurisdiction [of the United States], it is natural for 

Congress to say so in the statute, and failure to do so will 

negative the purpose of Congress in this regard.” Id. at 98. But 

it then declared that 

. . . the same rule of interpretation should not be 

applied to criminal statutes which are, as a class, not 

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logically dependent on their locality for the 

government’s jurisdiction, but are enacted because of 

the right of the government to defend itself against 

obstruction, or fraud wherever perpetrated, especially 

if committed by its own citizens, officers, or agents. 

Id. The Court then proceeded to discuss a series of statutes, 

unified, as the Court saw it, by the fact that “to limit their locus 

to the strictly territorial jurisdiction would be greatly to curtail 

the scope and usefulness of the statute,” id., citing statutes 

involving enticing desertions from naval service, thwarting the 

disposition of property captured as prize, bribing an officer of 

the United States to violate his duty, or a U.S. consul’s 

certifying a false invoice. 

In this court’s most recent discussion of Bowman we rested 

our finding that Congress intended extraterritorial application 

largely on the great likelihood that the outlawed conduct would 

occur abroad. In United States v. Delgado-Garcia, 374 F.3d 

1337, 1346 (D.C. Cir. 2004), we upheld extraterritorial 

application of a statute criminalizing the inducement of and 

assistance with unauthorized entry into the United States, 

observing, “It is natural to expect that a statute that protects the 

borders of the United States, unlike ordinary domestic statutes, 

would reach those outside the borders.” Id. at 1345. 

The government eschews the idea that Bowman and 

following cases such as Delgado-Garcia truly depend on the 

high probability that the criminalized conduct would occur 

abroad, and instead urges us to read Bowman as a broad rule 

that “criminal statutes that protect the United States 

government from harm should not be construed” to apply only 

within the United States. See Appellee’s Br. 15. But such an 

analysis requires treating almost all the discussion in Bowman

and Delgado-Garcia as surplusage and would purport to rebut 

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the presumption against extraterritoriality in broad swaths of 

the U.S. Code. 

Finally, the government argues that AEDPA, in reenacting 

§ 1114, implicitly adopted the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in 

United States v. Benitez, 741 F.2d 1312, 1317 (11th Cir. 1984), 

finding the section applicable extraterritorially. But while we 

presume that Congress knows of “well-settled judicial 

construction,” United States v. Davis, 139 S. Ct. 2319, 2331 

(2019), a lone appellate case hardly counts. As the Court said 

in Jama v. ICE, 543 U.S. 335, 349 (2005), “Neither of the two 

requirements for congressional ratification is met here: 

Congress did not simply reenact [the statute] without change, 

nor was the supposed judicial consensus so broad and 

unquestioned that we must presume Congress knew of and 

endorsed it.” So too here. 

We acknowledge that since AEDPA the Second Circuit 

has joined the Eleventh Circuit in finding § 1114 applicable 

abroad. See United States v. Siddiqui, 699 F.3d 690, 701 (2d 

Cir. 2012) (following the court’s prior decision in United States 

v. Al Kassar, 660 F.3d 108, 118 (2d Cir. 2011)). But neither of 

those circuits addressed the striking differences between § 1114 

and its neighbor § 1116 or grappled with the Supreme Court’s 

recent admonitions regarding the presumption against 

extraterritoriality. 

Because § 1114 does not apply extraterritorially, we must 

vacate the portion of the defendants’ convictions based on that 

statute. 

 2. 18 U.S.C. § 924(c) renders criminal the use of a firearm 

“in relation to any crime of violence or drug trafficking crime.” 

All agree that attempted murder under § 1116 qualifies as “a 

crime of violence” and that the defendants used a firearm. But 

that in itself isn’t enough to establish that § 924(c) applies 

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overseas—even where its application depends upon a crime of 

violence that (like § 1116) indisputably applies abroad. 

Section 924(c) belongs to a genus of statute that imposes 

liability only if a defendant commits a predicate crime. In RJR 

Nabisco, the Supreme Court faced a similar scheme established 

by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act 

(“RICO”). The Court made clear that for RICO to apply to 

conduct overseas, an absolute minimum is that “the predicates 

alleged in a particular case themselves apply extraterritorially.” 

As noted, § 1116 satisfies that criterion. 

But RJR Nabisco insisted on more: affirmative evidence of 

congressional intent that the umbrella crime itself (RICO there, 

§ 924(c) here) should apply to conduct overseas. The Court 

found such evidence in RICO’s explicit listing of named 

predicate offenses that each provided explicitly for 

extraterritorial application, including, for example, 18 U.S.C. 

§ 351(i) (incorporated into RICO by 18 U.S.C. § 1960(1)(G)); 

18 U.S.C. § 1957(d)(2) (incorporated into RICO by id. 

§ 1961(1)(B)). See RJR Nabisco, 136 S. Ct. at 2101–02 

(invoking these and similar predicate crimes). 

Section 924(c) defines a crime of violence in generic terms 

as a felony which “has as an element the use, attempted use, or 

threatened use of physical force against the person or property 

of another.” Id. § 924(c)(3)(A). We assume that such 

incorporation of a mass of crimes of violence, of which we may 

assume only a handful reflect a congressional intent of 

application abroad, would not satisfy RJR Nabisco. But 

§ 924(c) also includes drug trafficking crimes as predicate 

offenses (or at least § 924(c)’s analogy to RICO’s predicate 

offenses), see 18 U.S.C. § 924(c)(2), and specifically 

enumerates 46 U.S.C. § 70503. In the latter, subsection (a) 

identifies forbidden drug-trafficking conduct and subsection 

(b) specifies that (a) “applies even though the act is committed 

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outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” 

Following RJR Nabisco, we believe these predicates provide 

the necessary textual indication that Congress meant § 924(c) 

to apply overseas “to the extent that the predicates alleged in a 

particular case themselves apply extraterritorially.” 136 S. Ct. 

at 2101. 

Defendants would have us read § 924(c)’s reference to 

crimes of violence completely separately from the reference to 

particular drug crimes, so that the link that we have just 

described above would not satisfy RJR Nabisco. But the two 

segments are very closely linked historically. In § 924(c)’s 

original form, the statute referenced only crimes of violence as 

predicates. But courts applying the so-called “categorical” 

approach to the term concluded that drug trafficking offenses—

despite the propensity for violence when committed with a 

firearm—did not qualify as a violent felony. See generally 

United States v. Burris, 912 F.3d 386, 407 (6th Cir. 2019) (en 

banc) (Thapar, J., concurring) (collecting criticism of the 

categorical approach). Rather than have this swath of often 

violent conduct go under punished, Congress amended the 

statute to explicitly include enumerated drug trafficking 

offenses. See United States v. Davis, 139 S. Ct. 2319, 2331 

(2019) (outlining this history). Given this history, it makes 

sense to regard § 924(c)’s provisions on crimes of violence and 

drug trafficking as a package; defendants’ effort to wall the 

crimes of violence off from inferences largely based on the 

drug trafficking provisions will not wash. 

Today’s holding that § 924(c) applies extraterritorially 

where linked to an extraterritorially applying predicate fits with 

our decision in United States v. Ali, 718 F.3d 929 (D.C. Cir. 

2013). Ali held that the government could not charge a 

defendant with conspiracy to commit piracy when the conduct 

occurred overseas, even though the underlying predicate charge 

of piracy clearly applied to conduct outside the United States. 

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See id. at 942. We started from the broad proposition that “the 

extraterritorial reach of an ancillary offense like aiding and 

abetting or conspiracy is coterminous with that of the 

underlying criminal statute,” id. at 939, clearly a far broader 

view than that of RJR Nabisco. But we held that this rule did 

not hold when it came to conspiracy to commit piracy because 

such conspiracy liability would violate the law of nations, and 

we presume that Congress legislates with international law in 

mind. See id. at 942. 

That presumption, originally set forth in Murray v. 

Schooner Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 64 (1804), and 

known as the Charming Betsy doctrine, is different from the 

presumption against extraterritoriality. See Ali, 718 F.3d at 

935. The defendants do not raise a Charming Betsy issue in 

this case, and for good reason: International law’s protective 

principle allows a state to exercise jurisdiction to protect its 

officials overseas, which § 1116 and (in this case) § 924(c) do. 

See Restatement (Third) of Foreign Relations Law § 402; 

Restatement (Fourth) of Foreign Relations Law § 412. Of 

course even if defendants had invoked the Charming Betsy 

principle, it is only a presumption, see Ali, 718 F.3d at 942, 

which § 924(c)’s affirmative textual evidence displaces. 

 3. 18 U.S.C. § 924(j) applies a sentencing enhancement 

where a defendant commits a § 924(c) violation and “causes the 

death of a person through the use of a firearm.” If the killing 

“is a murder (as defined in [18 U.S.C. § 1111]),” the defendant 

may “be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of 

years or for life.” Id. § 924(j)(1). 

 In this case, the defendants wounded one American law 

enforcement officer, Agent Avila, who qualified for protection 

under § 1116, and they killed another agent, Agent Zapata, who 

qualified for protection only under § 1114. The defendants 

argue that, once we vacate their convictions under § 1114, we 

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must also vacate the jury’s finding that they caused Agent 

Zapata’s death for purposes of § 924(j). We disagree. 

Nothing in § 924(j) requires the predicate offense in 

§ 924(c) to also encompass the death in § 924(j). Indeed, 

someone can receive a § 924(j) enhancement if he commits a 

drug trafficking predicate for purposes of § 924(c) and an 

accidental death occurs (via a firearm) that qualifies as 

manslaughter. See § 924(j)(2) (providing a punishment for 

manslaughter). This means that a jury can hear evidence about 

a killing solely for purposes of establishing the elements of 

§ 924(j). 

 In this case, it’s true, the jury also learned about Agent 

Zapata’s death to establish the defendants’ liability under 

§ 1114. And the district court judge instructed the jury to make 

a finding regarding whether the defendants caused Agent 

Zapata’s death only after they found the defendants guilty of 

murder under § 1114. (It made sense to require the jury to 

engage in that sequential decision making because § 1114 and 

§ 924(j)(1) incorporate the same definition of murder set forth 

in § 1111.) But the jury would have heard the same evidence 

about Agent Zapata’s death in the absence of the § 1114 

charges, and the same elements of the § 924(j) charge, making 

harmless any resulting error in their inclusion and the resulting 

jury instructions. See Thompson, 921 F.3d at 269 (“Since no 

possible prejudice could have arisen from the asserted error, we 

conclude the error was harmless.”). 

* * * 

 The defendants also contest the district court’s decision to 

limit their ability to cross examine a government witness about 

his prior misconduct. Like the defendants, the witness served 

as a “sicario,” an assassin for the Zeta drug cartel, in which 

capacity he committed many acts plausibly described by the 

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defendants as heinous. And like the defendants, the witness 

participated in the attack on Agents Zapata and Avila. 

There is no dispute that evidence of lawlessness can 

undermine the perpetrator’s probable truthfulness, but 

admission of such evidence is subject to the sound discretion of 

the trial court. Here the district court prevented the defendant 

from interrogating the witness regarding his role in a 

smorgasbord of crimes, including “kidnapping and ordering 

people shot in the head, burning bodies in barrels of oil, [and] 

getting into a fire fight with the Mexican army.” C.A. 344. 

If there was any error in that ruling, we believe it was 

rendered fully harmless by the broad range of other heinous 

conduct that the court allowed defense counsel to bring out in 

cross-examination. Counsel extracted from the witness 

evidence about three murders he committed, in one of which 

(defense counsel alleged) the witness took another gang 

member “to a park to shoot him in the leg, torture him and kill 

him with a blow to the head with a sword.” C.A. 395. And on 

direct the jury learned that the witness worked as a sicario, led 

an assassination squad, participated in the attack on Agents 

Zapata and Avila, committed five carjackings, and kidnapped 

three men at gunpoint on the very same day as the attack. C.A. 

283, 294, 313–20. 

That mass of evidence was enough to enable the jury to 

assess the relation between the witness’s lawlessness and his 

propensity for truthfulness; it thus rendered harmless any error 

(if any error even occurred). 

* * * 

 Because we vacate the defendants’ convictions under 

§ 1114, we remand their cases for a limited resentencing in 

which the district court may determine whether to modify its 

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sentence in light of our vacatur. See United States v. Blackson, 

709 F.3d 36, 40 (D.C. Cir. 2013). 

 So ordered. 

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