Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/543/209/opinion.html
Timestamp: 2017-02-28 05:39:32
Document Index: 574794663

Matched Legal Cases: ['§371', '§371', '§371', '§1', '§846', '§1956', '§1956', '§371', '§1956', '§371', '§1956', '§1956']

Whitfield v. United States (Opinion of the Court) :: 543 U.S. 209 (2005) :: Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center Log In
As we explained in Shabani, these decisions “follow the settled principle of statutory construction that, absent contrary indications, Congress intends to adopt the common law definition of statutory terms. See Molzof v. United States, 502 U. S. 301, 307–308 (1992). We have consistently held that the common law understanding of conspiracy ‘does not make the doing of any act other than the act of conspiring a condition of liability.’ ” 513 U. S., at 13–14 (quoting Nash, supra, at 378). In concluding that the drug conspiracy statute in Shabani did not require proof of an overt act, we found instructive the distinction between that statute and the general conspiracy statute, §371, which supersedes the common law rule by expressly including an overt-act requirement. 513 U. S., at 14. See 18 U. S. C. §371 (“If two or more persons conspire either to commit any offense against the United States, or to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose, and one or more of such persons do any act to effect the object of the conspiracy, each shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both” (emphasis added)).
Shabani distilled the governing rule for conspiracy statutes as follows: “ ‘Nash and Singer give Congress a formulary: by choosing a text modeled on §371, it gets an overt-act requirement; by choosing a text modeled on the Sherman Act, 15 U. S. C. §1 [which, like 21 U. S. C. §846, omits any express overt-act requirement], it dispenses with such a requirement.’ ” 513 U. S., at 14 (quoting United States v. Sassi, 966 F. 2d 283, 284 (CA7 1992)). This rule dictates the outcome in the instant cases as well: Because the text of §1956(h) does not expressly make the commission of an overt act an element of the conspiracy offense, the Government need not prove an overt act to obtain a conviction.
Petitioners seek support for their construction of §1956(h) in the provision’s legislative history. They contend that this history contains no indication that Congress meant to create a new offense or to eliminate the pre-existing overt-act requirement for money laundering conspiracy prosecutions that hitherto had been brought under §371. They say that the history instead shows that §1956(h) was intended only to raise the penalty for money laundering conspiracy from the 5-year maximum sentence under §371 to the greater maximums available for substantive money laundering offenses under §§1956(a) and 1957. Petitioners also point out that, when Congress enacted §1956(h), it did so under the title “Penalty for Money Laundering Conspiracies,” 106 Stat., at 4066 (emphasis added). Had Congress wanted to enact an “offense” provision, they argue, it would have titled it accordingly.