Source: http://www.morelaw.com/verdicts/case.asp?n=14-50214&s=CA&d=107703
Timestamp: 2018-02-24 08:20:22
Document Index: 334975940

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 922', '§ 924', '§ 922', '§ 922', '§ 924', '§ 922', '§ 6', '§ 922', '§ 922']

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. LUCIO SALVADOR HERNANDEZ United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. LUCIO SALVADOR HERNANDEZ
Case Number: 14-50214
Judge: Mary M. Schroeder and Jay S. Bybee
Plaintiff's Attorney: Yasin Mohammad (argued), Assistant United States Attorney, Asset Forfeiture Section; Lawrence S. Middleton, Chief, Criminal Division; United States Attorney's Offic
Defendant's Attorney: Alexandra W. Yates (argued), Deputy Federal Public Defender; Hilary Potashner, Federal Public Defender; Office of the Federal Public Defender
Description: On January 20, 2011, Hernandez and his wife drove to Arizona from California to transfer the title on his car. While in Arizona, Hernandez went with his stepfather to a gun show, where Hernandez purchased five guns from a federal firearm licensee: two Glock Model 19 9mm pistols, two Jimenez Arms Model J.A. 380 .380 caliber pistols, and one Hi-Point Model C9 9mm pistol. This is a purchase he could not have made in California, where the law required a ten-day waiting period and prohibited the simultaneous purchase of multiple weapons. On a form required by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (“ATF”) to purchase guns, Hernandez reported Arizona as his state of current residence and his address as his mother's house in Arizona.
During the pretrial proceedings, a dispute arose as to what the government needed to prove to establish Hernandez's guilt. The government argued that, under Bryan, Hernandez was guilty of willfully transporting guns into California so long as he intended to violate some law in connection with the transportation of the firearms into California. The district court appeared to accept the government's theory and its reading of Bryan. For example, the district judge stated that “[the government needed] to show that [Hernandez is] doing something willfully which is illegal but it doesn't necessarily have to be the particular transportation that he knows is illegal. It could be something else.” The district court thus agreed to give an instruction, based on Bryan, that may have permitted the jury to find Hernandez guilty even if he did not know that his act of transporting guns into California was illegal. The court rejected an instruction that would have connected the required willfulness to the act of transporting the guns into California.
Hernandez was convicted after a jury trial in December 2013. In addition to evidence of Hernandez's knowledge of California's strict firearms laws, such as the prohibition on the simultaneous purchase of multiple firearms and the required waiting period, and evidence of the effort Hernandez had to expend in order to obtain the guns (a 12-hour drive each way to the gun show), the government presented evidence of Hernandez's arguable commission of uncharged crimes related to the firearms at issue. For example, the government introduced testimony from an ATF agent and a Pittsburg Police officer. The ATF agent testified that a “straw purchaser” is someone who purchases a firearm for “someone that cannot possess a firearm for whatever reason,” and stated that the defendant responded “I have no comment” when asked about the five firearms he purchased that were not recovered in his possession. The Pittsburg Police officer testified that, after the ATF searched Hernandez's home, Hernandez called to report that approximately 20 firearms were stolen from his home 6 months prior. In addition, the government presented a California gun store owner, Ron Kennedy, as an expert on gun distribution. Kennedy testified that a person like Hernandez, with a history of legally purchasing guns in California, likely would have known about California gun laws; that the types of guns purchased were not the types of guns a collector would purchase; and that the types of guns Hernandez purchased frequently turned up in ATF trace requests, i.e., requests generated by a gun's use in a crime, which Kennedy understood meant the guns were no longer in the possession of their original lawful purchaser.1 The government also introduced evidence to show that several of the guns Hernandez had purchased in Arizona were recovered by police officers in the possession of third parties, implying that he had sold the guns illegally upon his return.2 In closing, the government argued, in part, that this evidence was sufficient to show that Hernandez acted willfully because he intended to do “something” the law forbids, even if that “something” did not include the actual transportation of guns into his state of residence.3 His argument to the jury was that he was an Arizona resident. The jury found Hernandez guilty.
Hernandez's primary argument is that the government did not present sufficient evidence for a reasonable jury to find that his violation of 18 U.S.C. § 922(a)(3) was willful, as required under 18 U.S.C. § 924. We reverse a conviction on grounds of insufficient evidence if “in the light most favorable to the prosecution, [no] rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime.” Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319 (1979).
To begin, we turn to the Supreme Court's analysis in Bryan. There the defendant was charged with “willfully engaging in the business of dealing firearms” without a license. Bryan, 524 U.S. at 189 (citing § 922(a)(1)(A)). The defendant's sole argument on appeal was that the evidence was insufficient to prove that he sold guns “willfully” because he did not specifically know about the federal licensing requirement. Id. at 190–91. The defendant contended that the licensing requirement was similar to technical tax and antistructuring laws that imposed sanctions on only those defendants who knew of the specific legal duties they had to follow. Id. at 194 (citing Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192, 201 (1991); Ratzlaf v. United States, 510 U.S. 135, 138, 149 (1994)).
The Supreme Court disagreed. The Court noted that Cheek and Ratzlaf “involved highly technical statutes that presented the danger of ensnaring individuals engaged in apparently innocent conduct ․ ‘carv[ing] out an exception to the traditional rule’ that ignorance of the law is no excuse.” Id. at 194–95 (citing Cheek, 498 U.S. at 200). The Court declined to extend that exception to the licensing law at issue, holding that the government needed to show only that the “defendant knew that his conduct was unlawful” but not that it was unlawful specifically because of the federal licensing requirement. Id. at 195. That the defendant knew his selling of guns was unlawful could not have been doubted, the Court noted, because there was evidence that he had used straw purchasers to acquire the guns, told the straw purchasers that he would file the serial numbers off the guns before he sold them, and conducted his business on Brooklyn street corners known for drug dealing. Id at 189.
We agree with the government here that, just as with the licensing requirement at issue in Bryan, the prohibition on the transportation of guns in § 922(a)(3) is not subject to the heightened willfulness requirement used in some tax and antistructuring laws. We have applied the heightened standard only when “the criminal conduct is contained in a regulation instead of in a statute, and when the conduct is not obviously unlawful.” United States v. Henderson, 243 F.3d 1168, 1172 (9th Cir. 2001). In United States v. Ogles, we clarified that the word “willful” as used in § 924, which supplies the culpability required for § 922(a)(3), is the lower standard of willfulness. 406 F.3d 586, 590 n.1 (9th Cir. 2005), reh'g en banc granted, 430 F.3d 1221 (9th Cir. 2005); see United States v. Ogles, 440 F.3d 1095, 1097 (9th Cir. 2006) (en banc) (adopting the relevant portion of the original panel opinion). Thus, the government did not need to prove that Hernandez, while en route to California from Arizona, knew he was violating the particular federal statute against transporting firearms into one's state of residence.
There are many cases where the instruction given, which is taken directly from Bryan, is perfectly appropriate. However, where there is a serious risk that the jury might impute the willfulness to commit an uncharged crime to that required to prove the mens rea for the charged crime, more is required to ensure the government meets its burden of proof and the jury performs its duty. It is a longstanding precept of the common law that a person cannot be convicted of one crime on the basis of an intent to commit another. There must be a “concurrence of an evil-meaning mind with an evil-doing hand.” Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 251 (1952); see also Gasho v. United States, 39 F.3d 1420, 1429 (9th Cir. 1994) (“It is fundamental that a person is not criminally responsible unless criminal intent accompanies the wrongful act. ․ [The defendant must have] intended [to commit the crime] at the time that she [did].”); Wayne R. LaFave, 1 Subst. Crim. L. § 6.3(d) (2d ed. 2016) (“One problem is that of the necessary concurrence of the mental fault with the act or omission which is the basis for liability. ․ [M]ental states are not interchangeable between crimes; if one sets out with intent to cause the harm covered in crime A and then inadvertently causes the harm covered by crime B, neither crime A nor crime B has been committed.”). The instruction suggested by defense counsel here would have sufficed, as would have any other effective articulation of this distinction and direction as to the jury's use and proper consideration of evidence proffered by the government pursuant to Rule 404(b) of the Federal Rules of Evidence.
First, the district court emphatically rejected defense counsel's contention that Hernandez could not be convicted on the basis of a purpose “to commit an entirely separate crime at an entirely different time and place,” stating, “No, yes, he can.” Although the exchange took place outside the presence of the jury, it demonstrates the court's approval of the government's relying on future crimes to establish intent. Second, having received the green light from the district court, the government relied heavily on evidence that Hernandez committed crimes separate and distinct from the actual transportation of firearms. The government presented evidence, for instance, that Hernandez, when he was arrested, no longer had any of the purchased handguns, and the government was permitted to introduce evidence that the guns were later found in the possession of other people, despite a stipulation barring evidence of “recovery location information.” Third, over defense counsel's objection on relevancy grounds, the district court permitted a gun dealer to testify as an expert on gun distribution that the types of guns Hernandez purchased were often unlawfully sold in California, and permitted the government to argue that the evidence of Hernandez's intent to unlawfully distribute firearms to other individuals was relevant to establish Hernandez's willful violation of § 922(a)(3).
We hold that the broad jury instruction, combined with the evidence of the commission of later crimes and the government's argument to the jury, resulted in significant prejudice to Hernandez. The rule from the common law requires that a defendant's mental state and act coincide for a conviction to be valid. See Morrisette, 342 U.S. at 251. Neither Bryan nor §§ 922(a)(3) and 924 deviate from this rule. Here, the combination of the broad jury instruction and the government's introduction of evidence that Hernandez intended to later unlawfully sell the guns he purchased, raises a substantial likelihood that he was convicted for the act of transporting guns with the intent to commit a later crime rather than the one with which he was charged. This substantial likelihood requires reversal under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. See Deck v. Jenkins, 814 F.3d 954, 986 (9th Cir. 2016), amending 768 F.3d 1015 (9th Cir. 2014) (holding that the “prosecutor's misstatements regarding an element of the crime amount[s] to constitutional trial error” if the misstatements were central to the case and were not corrected by the trial court's instructions to the jury).
Outcome: We recognize that “a constitutional trial error will not warrant reversal if it was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.” Id. at 985 (citing Chapman v. California, 386 U.S. 18, 24 (1967)). While it is possible on this record the jury found that Hernandez transported firearms willfully, we cannot conclude this beyond a reasonable doubt. We therefore cannot conclude on this record that the constitutional trial error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt.