Opinion ID: 6500514
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Jury Instructions and Sufficiency of the

Text: Evidence Next, the Defendants challenge the jury instructions and the sufficiency of the evidence pertaining to the RICO conspiracy convictions, but they do so by attacking only one predicate act: extortion under the federal Hobbs Act.52 Their 52 Pelullo and William Maxwell set forth the challenges to the RICO conspiracy convictions that are addressed in this section. Their arguments were specifically adopted by each other and by John Maxwell, so the claims in this section apply to all three of those Defendants. Though Scarfo did not specifically adopt the other Defendants’ arguments and thus forfeited them, see supra note 19, we nonetheless refer to the 89 challenges thus fail for a simple reason: they do not address any of the other predicate acts that support those convictions, and each convicted Defendant had more than two such acts to their discredit, so the elimination of the Hobbs Act predicate makes no difference.53 Even if we agreed with their Hobbs Act arguments (which we do not), their convictions for RICO conspiracy are still supported by the other predicate acts found by the jury. See United States v. Pungitore, 910 F.2d 1084, 1107 (3d Cir. 1990) (“Thus, even if we deleted the [extortion] act, we would affirm the convictions” for RICO conspiracy.). Their convictions for RICO conspiracy thus stand.