Opinion ID: 2643963
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: References to Carpenter's Profit Motive

Text: The district court's third assignment of error was in the government's references to Carpenter's desire to profit off the exchangors, which the district court recharacterized as greed, although the government never used that term. The government did refer to Carpenter's desire to trade in riskier instruments that could bring in a greater profit for himself and his business partner. The government also highlighted the fact that Carpenter sought to earn that profit using other people's money. The district court, in its new trial order, held that these comments improperly drove the jury toward a guilty verdict based on moral and that banks are able to pay interest rates in the first place by putting money to other uses. Money that is parked, the court continued, is not invested at all under a literal understanding of the economic theory and therefore could not have earned interest. The district court concluded that [t]he exchangors, all relatively sophisticated in business, must all have expected that their so-called parked funds would somehow be invested. But the jury was free to decide that the exchangors, sophisticated though they may be, understood account and park in the ordinary sense. The court's order also does not deal at all with the evidence actually presented to the jury, and Carpenter has not identified any point in the trial where he developed that strict theory. If Carpenter wanted the factfinder to use a different meaning of park and escrow account than an ordinary person would use, Carpenter could have presented his alternative to the jury. -19- chastisement of Carpenter rather than the elements of the fraud crimes charged. We disagree for several reasons. The argument was a legitimate one directly related to the government's burden of showing intent. To have committed fraud against the exchangors, Carpenter must have had the specific intent to mislead them at the time he solicited their business. The government's argument went to why Carpenter had a motive to commit fraud. This fraud would increase the amount of money he would make off of the exchangors' investments. Had there been full disclosure, especially after Carpenter knew his risky investment strategy had failed, the exchangors would never have made the investments to begin with or maintained them with Benistar. In addition, we do not think such argument could have distracted the jury from the task before it or distracted it from its evaluation of the evidence of Carpenter's intent.