Opinion ID: 613010
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Was the Variance Prejudicial?

Text: As noted, to be grounds for reversal, a variance must be severe enough to affect the defendant's substantial rights. Tormos-Vega, 959 F.2d at 1115 (citing Berger v. United States, 295 U.S. 78, 82, 55 S.Ct. 629, 79 L.Ed. 1314 (1935)). The `substantial rights' protected by this rule are that the defendant have sufficient knowledge of the charge against him in order to prepare an effective defense and avoid surprise at trial, and to prevent a second prosecution for the same offense. Id. In addition, a variance can affect a defendant's substantial rights where, in cases with multiple defendants, proof that one defendant was involved in one conspiracy leads the jury to believe that another defendant was involved in a separate conspiracy. Id. We review de novo whether a variance affected a defendant's substantial rights. United States v. Fornia-Castillo, 408 F.3d 52, 67 (1st Cir.2005). The defendants claim that they tailored their defense strategy at trial to their expectation that the government was obligated to prove the entire conspiracy as charged. Thus stated, the defendants' claim of prejudice is not one about fair notice of the charges or conduct at issue. Instead, their claim of prejudice rests uneasily on their misunderstanding about the legal sufficiency of the government's narrower proof. To the extent that the defendants believed that the government's conspiracy charge would fail because the government could only prove the narrower conspiracy to maintain Care's tax-exempt status, they misunderstood the law of conspiracy in this circuit. That misunderstanding cannot support a claim of prejudice. We have previously rejected similar claims in analogous circumstances. See Mueffelman, 470 F.3d at 38-39 (rejecting a claim of prejudice where the defendant structured his defense to combat a claim that the government was not required to prove); accord United States v. Davis, 679 F.2d 845, 852 (11th Cir.1982) (Appellants' contention that they suffered prejudice because they were prepared to defend against the larger conspiracy but not the smaller one is nothing more than an argument that they had less of a defense against the smaller conspiracy since the larger one may not have existed.). Moreover, even if the nature of the prejudice claimed by the defendants was legally relevant (which it is not), the defendants have not pointed to any evidence in the voluminous trial record that reflects a less-than-vigorous defense. Although the defendants do not elaborate in their briefs on their prejudice claim, counsel for the defendants asserted at oral argument that, because they believed the government's inability to prove a conspiracy to obtain Care's tax-exempt status in 1993 would be fatal to the conspiracy charged, their defense did not emphasize the weaknesses of the government's circumstantial evidence of any narrower agreement to maintain that status. Our own review of the record does not support the defendants' claim. To begin with, although the government has conceded on appeal that it charged a unitary conspiracy to both obtain and maintain Care's tax exemption, it argued below that the indictment charged a multiple-object conspiracy. The trial judge did not reject that argument until after the close of the government's evidence. In their initial Rule 29 motion, the defendants challenged Count 2 only on the ground that the government had failed to demonstrate that the defendants had, in fact, reached an agreement among themselves sometime after 1993. [26] It was not until their memorandum in support of a renewed Rule 29 motion that the defendants first suggested that the indictment did not charge a conspiracy with separate objects. Similarly, the defendants' proposed jury instruction on the conspiracy count merely specified that the jury must be required to find that the object of their agreement was to impede or thwart the IRS as alleged in the indictment. . . . If you find that tax fraud was not the object of the conspiracy, then even if you find that tax fraud was a foreseeable consequence of the conspiracy, you must find the defendants not guilty. Again, the defendants' own conduct reveals no particular emphasis on the unity of the charged object. Nor have we found that the defendants placed an undue emphasis on defending against the government's proof of Muntasser's agreement with unindicted co-conspirators in 1993. In fact, Muntasser's principal defense to the Count 2 conspiracy was that he withdrew from the conspiracy by 1996. [27] He expressed this position through the opening statement of his defense counsel, through cross-examination of witnesses, including Afif Kadri, one of Care's founding officers, and again through closing argument. The absence of outward indications of prejudice is not a surprise: a less-than-vigorous defense of the conduct underlying the narrower conspiracy would have compromised the defendants' defense of other charges. For example, the evidence supporting the narrower conspiracy was directly relevant to Count 1, which charged all three defendants with a scheme to conceal material facts from the FBI, IRS, and INS, and Count 8, which charged all three defendants with endeavoring to obstruct the due administration of the Internal Revenue laws. Thus, even if the defendants subjectively believed that the government's failure to prove a conspiracy to fraudulently obtain Care's tax exemption in 1993 was fatal to the conspiracy claim, the defendants had strong incentives to continue to challenge the evidence that most demonstrated their willing agreement to fraudulently maintain that exemption in subsequent years. Finally, in a different version of their prejudice argument, the defendants claim that the variance affected their substantial rights because, by charging a larger conspiracy than it could ultimately prove, the government was permitted to introduce much of the so-called terrorism evidence, relevant to Muntasser's initial motivation for incorporating Care, which would not have been admissible if the government had charged only the narrower conspiracy at the outset. According to the defendants, The government should not be permitted to have it both ways (i.e., securing the admission of potentially inflammatory evidence through a broadly worded charge while securing a conviction on a narrower ground). The defendants have underestimated the extent to which the challenged evidence was relevant to the narrower conspiracy. The most inflammatory evidence presented at trial was the content of Care's Al-Hussam newsletters, with its accounts of the violent jihad being conducted overseas, described by the district court as blood curdling. While the newsletters were probative of whether Care was a successor to Al-Kifah and whether Muntasser incorporated Care to legitimize the tax exemption Al-Kifah incorrectly claimed, they also played a central role in explaining why Care's Form 990 filings were fraudulent. Similarly, the expert testimony explaining the concept of economic jihad, and thus the way in which Care's orphan sponsorship program, among other things, promoted and supported the mujahideen and jihad, would have been independently admissible to prove the pattern of conscious concealment that reflected agreement among the defendants when they filed the Form 990s. Consequently, in this way as well, the variance in proof at trial did not prejudice the defendants' substantial rights. [28]