Source: https://m.openjurist.org/500/us/257
Timestamp: 2020-07-08 09:00:27
Document Index: 659128905

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 9', '§ 1951', '§ 1951', '§ 201', '§ 872', '§ 1952', '§ 1951']

500 U.S. 257 - McCormick v. United States
500 US 257 McCormick v. United States
Robert L. McCORMICK, Petitioner,
It goes without saying that matters of intent are for the jury to consider. Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. ----, ----, 111 S.Ct. 604, ----, 112 L.Ed.2d 617 (1991). It is also plain that each of the seven factors that the Court of Appeals thought should be considered in determining the parties' intent present an issue of historical fact. Thus even assuming the Court of Appeals was correct on the law, the conviction should not have been affirmed on that basis but should have been set aside and a new trial ordered. Bollenbach v. United States, 326 U.S. 607, 613-614, 66 S.Ct. 402, 405-406, 90 L.Ed. 350 (1946); Cole v. Arkansas, 333 U.S. 196, 201-202, 68 S.Ct. 514, 517, 92 L.Ed. 644 (1948). Cf. Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750, 763 (1946); Cabana v. Bullock, 474 U.S. 376, 384, 106 S.Ct. 689, 695-96, 88 L.Ed.2d 704 (1986); Carpenters v. United States, 330 U.S. 395, 408, 67 S.Ct. 775, 782, 91 L.Ed. 973 (1947). If for no other reason, therefore, the judgment of the Court of Appeals must be reversed and the case remanded for further proceedings.8
We agree with the Court of Appeals that in a case like this it is proper to inquire whether payments made to an elected official are in fact campaign contributions, and we agree that the intention of the parties is a relevant consideration in pursuing this inquiry. But we cannot accept the Court of Appeals' approach to distinguishing between legal and illegal campaign contributions. The Court of Appeals stated that payments to elected officials could violate the Hobbs Act without proof of an explicit quid pro quo by proving that the payments "were never intended to be legitimate campaign contributions." 896 F.2d, at 66 (emphasis added).9 This issue, as we read the Court of Appeals' opinion, actually involved two inquiries; for after applying the factors the Court of Appeals considered relevant, it arrived at two conclusions: first, that McCormick was extorting money for his continued support of the 1985 legislation and "[f]urther", id., at 67, that the money was never intended by the parties to be a campaign contribution at all. The first conclusion, especially when considered in light of the second, asserts that the campaign contributions were illegitimate, extortionate payments.
The United States agrees that if the payments to McCormick were campaign contributions, proof of a quid pro quo would be essential for an extortion conviction, Brief for United States 29-30, and quotes the instruction given on this subject in 9 Department of Justice Manual § 9-85A.306, p. 9-1938.134 (Supp.1988-2): "campaign contributions will not be authorized as the subject of a Hobbs Act prosecution unless they can be proven to have been given in return for the performance of or abstaining from an official act; otherwise any campaign contribution might constitute a violation." We thus disagree with the Court of Appeals' holding in this case that a quid pro quo is not necessary for conviction under the Hobbs Act when an official receives a campaign contribution.10 By the same token, we hold, as McCormick urges, that the District Court's instruction to the same effect was error.11
When, in the 1960s, it first occurred to federal prosecutors to use the Hobbs Act to reach what was essentially the soliciting of bribes by state officials, courts were unimpressed with the notion. They thought that public officials were not guilty of extortion when they accepted, or even when they requested, voluntary payments designed to influence or procure their official action. United States v. Hyde, 448 F.2d 815, 833 (CA5 1971) ("The distinction from bribery is therefore . . . the fear and lack of voluntariness on the part of the victim"); United States v. Addonizio, 451 F.2d 49, 72 (CA3 1971) ("[W]hile the essence of bribery is voluntariness, the essence of extortion is duress"); United States v. Kubacki, 237 F.Supp. 638, 641 (ED Pa.1965) (same). Not until 1972 did any court apply the Hobbs Act to bribery. See United States v. Kenny, 462 F.2d 1205, 1229 (CA3 1972) ("kickbacks" by construction contractors to public officials established extortion "under color of official right," despite absence of "threat, fear, or duress"). That holding was soon followed by the Seventh Circuit in United States v. Braasch, 505 F.2d 139, 151 (1974), which said that "[s]o long as the motivation for the payment focuses on the recipient's office, the conduct falls within the ambit of 18 U.S.C. § 1951." While Kenny, Braasch, and subsequent cases were debated in academic writing, compare Ruff, Federal Prosecution of Local Corruption: A Case Study in the Making of Law Enforcement Policy, 65 Georgetown L.J. 1171 (1977) (criticizing Kenny ), with Lindgren, The Elusive Distinction between Bribery and Extortion: From the Common Law to the Hobbs Act, 35 UCLA L.Rev. 815 (1988) (defending Kenny ), the Courts of Appeals accepted the expansion with little disagreement, see, e.g., United States v. Harding, 563 F.2d 299, 302-303 (CA6 1977); United States v. Hathaway, 534 F.2d 386, 393 (CA1 1976); United States v. Hall, 536 F.2d 313, 320-321 (CA10 1976); but see United States v. Cerilli, 603 F.2d 415, 426-437 (CA3 1979) (Aldisert, J., dissenting), and this Court has never had occasion to consider the matter.
Finally, where the United States Code explicitly criminalizes conduct such as that alleged in the present case, it calls the crime bribery, not extortion—and like all bribery laws I am aware of (but unlike § 1951 and all other extortion laws I am aware of) it punishes not only the person receiving the payment but the person making it. See 18 U.S.C. § 201(b) (criminalizing bribery of and by federal officials).* Compare 18 U.S.C. § 872 (criminalizing extortion by federal officials, making no provision for punishment of person extorted). McCormick, though not a federal official, is subject to federal prosecution for bribery under the Travel Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1952, which criminalizes the use of interstate commerce for purposes of bribery—and reaches, of course, both the person giving and the person receiving the bribe.
I mean only to raise this argument, not to decide it, for it has not been advanced and there may be persuasive responses. See, e.g., Lindgren, supra, at 837-889 (arguing that under early common law bribery and extortion were not separate offenses and that extortion did not require proof of a coerced payment). But unexamined assumptions have a way of becoming, by force of usage, unsound law. See, e.g., Moskal v. United States, 498 U.S. ----, 111 S.Ct. 461, 112 L.Ed.2d 449 (1990). Before we are asked to go further down the road of making reasonable but textually unapparent distinctions in a federal "payment for official action" statute—as we unquestionably will be asked, see ante, at 267, n. 5 I think it well to bear in mind that the statute may not exist.
The extortion was completed on June 1, 1984, when Vandergrift personally delivered an envelope containing nine $100 bills to petitioner. The fact that the payment was not reported as a campaign contribution, as required by West Virginia law, or as taxable income, as required by federal law, together with other circumstantial evidence, adequately supports the conclusion that the money was intended as a payment to petitioner personally to induce him to act favorably on the licensing legislation. His covert acceptance of the cash—indeed, his denial at trial that he received any such payment—supports the conclusion that petitioner understood the payers' intention and that he had implicitly (at least) promised to provide them with the benefit that they sought.
As I understand its opinion, the Court would agree that these facts would constitute a violation of the Hobbs Act if the understanding that the money was a personal payment rather than a campaign contribution had been explicit rather than implicit and if the understanding that, in response to the payment, petitioner would endeavor to provide the payers with the specific benefit they sought had also been explicit rather than implicit. In my opinion there is no statutory requirement that illegal agreements, threats, or promises be in writing, or in any particular form. Subtle extortion is just as wrongful—and probably much more common than the kind of express understanding that the Court's opinion seems to require.
As I have explained, the crime of extortion was complete when petitioner accepted the cash pursuant to an understanding that he would not carry out his earlier threat to withhold official action and instead would go forward with his contingent promise to take favorable action on behalf of the unlicensed physicians. What he did thereafter might have evidentiary significance, but could neither undo a completed crime or complete an uncommitted offense. When petitioner took the money, he was either guilty or not guilty. For that reason, proof of a subsequent quid pro quo—his actual support of the legislation—was not necessary for the Government's case. And conversely, evidence that petitioner would have supported the legislation anyway is not a defense to the already completed crime. The thug who extorts protection money cannot defend on the ground that his threat was only a bluff because he would not have smashed the shopkeeper's windows even if the extortion had been unsuccessful. It was in this sense that the District Court correctly advised the jury that the Government did not have to prove the delivery of a postpayment quid pro quo, as illustrated by these excerpts from the instructions:
"In order to find Mr. McCormick guilty of
"So it is not necessary that the government prove that the defendant committed or promised to commit a quid pro quo, that is, consideration in the nature of official action in return for the payment of the money not lawfully owed. Such a quid pro quo may, of course, be forthcoming in an extortion case or it may not. In either event it is not an essential element of the crime." App. 20-22.1
The Court treats this sentence as though it authorized the jury to find that a legitimate campaign contribution is involuntary and constitutes extortion whenever the contributor expects to benefit from the candidate's election.2 In my opinion this is a gross misreading of that sentence in the context of the entire set of instructions.
In my judgment, the instructions, read as a whole, properly focused the jury's attention on the critical issue of the candidate's and contributor's intent at the time the specific payment was made.3 But even if they were ambiguous, or subject to improvement, they certainly do not provide a basis for reversing the conviction when the petitioner failed to advise the District Court of an error this Court now believes it has detected.
Given that the District Court's instructions to the jury largely tracked the instructions requested by petitioner at trial, I can see no legitimate reason for this Court now to find these instructions inadequate. Because I am convinced that the petitioner was fairly tried and convicted by a properly instructed jury, I would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals. Of course, an affirmance of the Court of Appeals' judgment would not mean that we necessarily affirm the Court of Appeals' opinion.4 It is sufficient that an affirmance of McCormick's conviction rest on the legal and factual theories actually presented to the jury, whether or not these theories were the ones relied upon by the Court of Appeals.
Until the early 1970's, extortion prosecutions under the Hobbs Act rested on allegations that the consent of the transferor of property had been "induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear—"; public officials had not been prosecuted under the "color of official right" phrase standing alone. Beginning with the conviction involved in United States v. Kenny, 462 F.2d 1205 (CA3 1972), however, the federal courts accepted the Government's submission that because of the disjunctive language of § 1951(b)(2), allegations of force, violence or fear were not necessary. Only proof of the obtaining of property under claims of official right was necessary. Furthermore, every Court of Appeals to have construed the phrase held that it did not require a showing that the public official "induced" the payor's consent by some affirmative act such as a demand or solicitation. Although there was some difference in the language of these holdings, the "color of official right" element required no more than proof of the payee's acceptance knowing that the payment was made for the purpose of influencing his official actions. In 1984, however, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, en banc, held that some affirmative act of inducement by the official had to be shown to prove the Government's case. United States v. O'Grady, 742 F.2d 682 (1984). In 1988, the Ninth Circuit, en banc, agreed with the Second Circuit, overruling a prior decision expressing the majority rule. United States v. Aguon, 851 F.2d 1158 (1988). Other courts have been unimpressed with the view expressed in O'Grady and Aguon. See, e.g., United States v. Evans, 910 F.2d 790, 796-797 (CA11 1990), cert. pending, No. 90-6105; United States v. Spitler, 800 F.2d 1267, 1274 (CA4 1986); United States v. Paschall, 772 F.2d 68, 71 (CA4 1985).