Opinion ID: 763759
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Propriety of a Pinkerton

Text: Instruction Under State Law 138 Vidro and Zapata claim that the district court was obliged to look to Connecticut law to determine the propriety and language of a Pinkerton instruction. This argument is meritless. As noted above, the racketeering statutes are not meant to incorporate state procedural and evidentiary law; rather, references to state law in these statutes merely serve a definitional purpose, that is, to identify generally the kind of conduct made illegal by the federal statute. See Coonan, 938 F.2d at 1564; Paone, 782 F.2d at 393. Therefore, the court was not required to consider state law in its Pinkerton instruction. C. Lesser Included Offense Instruction 139 Zapata requested at the charging conference that the district court instruct the jury on manslaughter as a lesser included offense for all the alleged murders in the case. As part of that instruction, Zapata asked the court to instruct the jury that if they found a defendant guilty of manslaughter, they must find him not guilty of the corresponding VICAR offense because manslaughter is not included among the crimes enumerated in the VICAR statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1959. Zapata therefore claims that the court's refusal to give the requested lesser included offense instruction on manslaughter for the Council murder is reversible error because the jury could have found that the Latin King shooters who killed Council acted recklessly instead of intentionally. This claim is without merit. 140 Fed.R.Crim.P. 31(c) permits a jury to return a verdict of guilty as to an offense necessarily included in the offense charged. In Schmuck v. United States, 489 U.S. 705, 109 S.Ct. 1443, 103 L.Ed.2d 734 (1989), the Supreme Court explained that a court should apply an elements test to determine whether a lesser-included-offense instruction is proper under Rule 31(c). See id. at 716, 109 S.Ct. 1443. Under this test, a defendant is entitled to a lesser-included offense instruction under federal law only if (1) the elements of the lesser offense are a subset of the elements of the charged offense, see id.; United States v. Hourihan, 66 F.3d 458, 464-65 (2d Cir.1995); and (2) the evidence at trial permits a rational jury to find the defendant guilty of the lesser offense and acquit him of the greater, see Keeble v. United States, 412 U.S. 205, 208, 93 S.Ct. 1993, 36 L.Ed.2d 844 (1973). 141 In determining, under the first prong of the test, whether an offense constitutes a lesser-included offense of the charged offense, we compare the statutory elements of the offenses in question, and not ... [the] conduct proved at trial. Schmuck, 489 U.S. at 716-17, 109 S.Ct. 1443. Therefore, regardless of the evidence adduced at trial, [w]here the lesser offense requires an element not required for the greater offense, no instruction is to be given under Rule 31(c). Id. at 716, 109 S.Ct. 1443. 142 In this case, all of the homicides were charged as either racketeering acts of murder under the RICO statute, see 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c), or murders in aid of racketeering under the VICAR statute, see 18 U.S.C. § 1959(a). Murder under either statute, however, is not simply a federalized version of the state crime. Rather, it is a distinct substantive offense that requires proof of its own particular elements. As such, under the elements test, manslaughter is not a lesser included offense of RICO and VICAR murder under federal law. Therefore, the district court properly declined to provide a lesser-included offense instruction for manslaughter. D. Reasonable Doubt Instruction 143 E. Rodriguez requested that the district court give the jury an instruction defining reasonable doubt to include the phrase: a reasonable doubt may arise not only from evidence produced, but also from a lack of evidence. Instead, the district court charged the jury in accordance with the pattern instruction contained in § 12.10 of 1 Devitt & Blackmar, Federal Jury Practice and Instructions (4th ed.1992), that did not contain the lack of evidence provision. Relying on jury charges given in New York and Connecticut state courts that include such a provision, E. Rodriguez argues that the court's refusal to charge the jury on his proposed instruction defining reasonable doubt deprived him of a fair trial and due process of law and, therefore, constituted reversible error. We disagree. 144 It is irrelevant that defendants in state courts in this jurisdiction, such as Connecticut and New York, are given a reasonable doubt charge that includes the term lack of evidence or lack or insufficiency of the evidence, while defendants in federal courts are charged differently. We have recognized that [a]lthough application of the reasonable-doubt standard in criminal cases is required as a matter of due process, 'the Constitution neither prohibits trial courts from defining reasonable doubt nor requires them to do so as a matter of course.'  Desimone, 119 F.3d at 226 (quoting Victor v. Nebraska, 511 U.S. 1, 5, 114 S.Ct. 1239, 127 L.Ed.2d 583 (1994)). Indeed, because of the difficulty inherent in trying to articulate an acceptable definition of reasonable doubt for the jury, several circuits, including this one, generally discourage district courts from trying to define the term. See id. Therefore, a district court's failure to define reasonable doubt cannot, by itself, constitute reversible error. See id. at 227. 145 Even if a failure to include the lack of evidence term could be construed as error, we examine the jury instructions as a whole, see Vargas v. Keane, 86 F.3d 1273, 1277 (2d Cir.1996) (citing Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U.S. 141, 146-47, 94 S.Ct. 396, 38 L.Ed.2d 368 (1973)), to assess 'whether there is a reasonable likelihood that the jury understood the instructions to allow conviction based on proof insufficient to meet' the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Id. (quoting Victor, 511 U.S. at 6, 114 S.Ct. 1239); see Desimone, 119 F.3d at 227; United States v. Birbal, 62 F.3d 456, 462 (2d Cir.1995). We have further noted that an asserted error in a reasonable doubt instruction may be innocuous or inconsequential when viewed in context of the charge as a whole. Vargas, 86 F.3d at 1277. 146 Here, it was not likely that the jury understood the district court's instruction on reasonable doubt to mean it could convict based on insufficient proof. We find that the court's use of the model instruction in § 12.10 of Devitt & Blackmar correctly conveyed the concept of reasonable doubt to the jury. Victor, 511 U.S. at 22, 114 S.Ct. 1239 (internal quotation marks omitted); see also United States v. Ivic, 700 F.2d 51, 69 (2d Cir.1983) (approving of same instruction, formerly § 11.14 of Devitt & Blackmar (3d ed.1977)); see also Birbal, 62 F.3d at 459-60 (noting a district court's failure to heed this Court's repeated warnings against embellishing upon the standards recommended in 1 Devitt & Blackmar (quoting United States v. Delibac, 925 F.2d 610, 614 (2d Cir.1991) (per curiam))). Moreover, when viewing the charges as a whole, the record reflects that the court referred to the concept of reasonable doubt at least eighteen times throughout the charge, that it charged the jury on four additional occasions that its verdict must be based solely upon the evidence developed at trial or the lack of evidence, and that, at one point, it instructed the jury that [y]our concern ... is to determine whether or not on the evidence or lack of evidence the defendant's guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Accordingly, we conclude that E. Rodriguez was not prejudiced by the court's failure to define reasonable doubt with the lack of evidence term.