Opinion ID: 808712
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Jury instruction on Count 2

Text: Cornelius objects to the district court’s charge to the jury—via both jury Instruction 32 and the court’s response to the jury’s subsequent related question, discussed above in the Background—that it need not find that an enterprise existed under Count 1 in order to convict under Count 2. Cornelius argues that this was a clearly 6 See also supra n.4. 15 erroneous statement of Tenth Circuit law. We conclude that Cornelius’s argument fails both under the invited error rule, because Cornelius waived his right to challenge the jury instruction on appeal by expressly endorsing it at trial; or alternatively, considering the question under our forfeiture standard of review, the instruction was not clearly erroneous. Under the invited error doctrine, this Court will not engage in appellate review when a defendant has waived his right to challenge a jury instruction by affirmatively approving it at trial. “[A] party that has forfeited a right by failing to make a proper objection may obtain relief for plain error; but a party that has waived a right is not entitled to appellate relief.” United States v. Cruz-Rodriguez, 570 F.3d 1179, 1183 (10th Cir. 2009) (internal quotation marks, citation omitted). “A waived claim or defense is one that a party has knowingly and intelligently relinquished; a forfeited plea is one that a party has merely failed to preserve.” Wood v. Milyard, 132 S.Ct. 1826, 1832 n.4 (2012); see also United States v. Olano, 507 U.S. 725, 733 (1993); United States v. McGehee, 672 F.3d 860, 873 (10th Cir. 2012) (“Waiver is accomplished by intent, but forfeiture comes about through neglect.” (quotation marks, citation, alterations omitted)). “Nonwaivable rights are rare,” such that waiver is only disallowed when there exists a “need to protect a public interest beyond that of the defendant or because of concern that undue, and unprovable, pressure may have been brought to bear on the defendant.” United States v. Teague, 443 F.3d 1310, 1316 (10th Cir. 2006). 16 We have found waiver, for instance, when a defendant proposed and agreed to certain conditions of supervised release, and later sought to challenge them. See id. at 1315-16. Similarly, the Seventh Circuit has held that an attorney’s express approval of a jury instruction before its submission to the jury precluded appellate review of his client’s subsequent claim that the instruction was faulty. See United States v. Griffin, 84 F.3d 912, 923 (7th Cir. 1996). In contrast, mere forfeiture occurs where, for example, a defendant simply indicates that he has no objection to a proposed jury instruction at the jury instruction conference. See Harris, No. 10-3173, -- F.3d at -- n.4. In this case, as discussed above in the Background, Cornelius’s attorney expressed concern about the answer the district court gave to the jury in response to its question about the relationship between Counts 1 and 2, by way of expressly adopting the position stated by counsel for one of Cornelius’s codefendants. Cornelius’s attorney effectively stated that the district court’s instruction-clarifying charge to the jury—namely, that the jury’s respective findings in Counts 1 and 2 were mutually independent—was confusing and misleading. He preferred that the judge respond to the jury’s question simply by instructing the jury to reread the instructions they had already received, wherein the proper legal guidance was already present. However, when the judge explicitly asked defense counsel whether the response the judge was giving the jury contained a misstatement of the law or would in fact mislead the jury, defense counsel replied in the negative. Further, defense counsel expressly endorsed Instruction 32, which contained 17 the statement of law with which Cornelius now asserts error. Instruction 32 had advised that, for Count 2, [u]nlike the charge in Count 1, the government need not prove . . . that the alleged enterprise was actually established . . . . An offense is established if the government proves that, if the conspiracy were completed . . . and the enterprise established, that: 1) the defendant would be employed by or associated with the enterprise; and 2) that the enterprise affected interstate or foreign commerce. R. Vol. 2 at 358-59 (emphases added). Thus, not only did Cornelius originally agree to this instruction, but later he implored the trial judge to instruct jurors to return to this now-challenged instruction if the jurors had any doubts about whether the existence of an enterprise needed to be established for conviction on conspiracy. The invited error doctrine would preclude Cornelius from challenging the “proposition that [he] had urged the district court to adopt.” United States v. Deberry, 430 F.3d 1294, 1302 (10th Cir. 2005); see Griffin, 84 F.3d at 923. If we determined that Cornelius’s express endorsement of the original jury instruction amounted to waiver, we would not review the merits of this issue on appeal. However, in an unpublished opinion concerning one of Cornelius’s co-defendants—namely, the codefendant whose position on this jury instruction it was that Cornelius’s attorney adopted—we said that while defense counsel’s actions “teeter on the edge, they ultimately fall on the side of neglect, rather than intent,” and therefore amount to “a forfeiture, rather than an invited error.” United States v. Smith, 454 F. App’x 686, 692 (10th Cir. 2012) (unpublished). Smith, of course, does not constitute binding precedent because it is an unpublished disposition. 18 But even if we were to agree with and adopt the analysis in Smith and considered the statements of Cornelius’s counsel to constitute forfeiture rather than waiver, we would review for plain error.7 See id. Under the plain-error standard, we would conclude that no error, let alone plain error, occurred here, because as we explain in Harris, the actual existence of enterprise is not a required element of 18 U.S.C. § 1962(d). See Harris, No. 10-3173, -- F.3d. at --. Hence, whether we consider Cornelius’s jury-instruction objection waived and refuse to consider its merits under the invited error doctrine, or whether we treat the objection as forfeited and review for plain error, Cornelius’s argument on appeal fails.