Opinion ID: 2816319
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Elements of Hobbs Act Extortion

Text: Under Color of Official Right The federal statute penalizing extortion, 18 U.S.C. § 1951, a codification of the 1946 Hobbs Act, provides that: Whoever in any way or degree obstructs, delays, or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce, by robbery or extortion or attempts or conspires so to do, or commits or threatens physical violence to any person or property in furtherance of a plan or purpose to do anything in violation of this section shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both. 18 U.S.C. § 1951(a). Extortion is defined as “the obtaining of property from another, with his consent, induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence, or fear, or under color of official right.” Id. § 1951(b)(2). As we explained in United States v. Manzo, 636 F.3d 56 (3d Cir. 2011): 6 Congress sought to proscribe coercive activity through enactment of the Hobbs Act. Under the terms of the Hobbs Act, a person can only commit extortion in one of two ways: (1) through threatened force, violence or fear or (2) under color of official right. See 18 U.S.C. § 1951(b)(2). Both of these types of extortion are inherently coercive. Id. at 65. Whereas in a case of extortion by force, violence, or fear, the acts or threats supply the coercion, “when proceeding under a ‘color of official right’ theory, the ‘misuse of public office is said to supply the element of coercion.’” Id. (quoting United States v. Hathaway, 534 F.2d 386, 393 (1st Cir. 1976)); see also Evans v. United States, 504 U.S. 255, 266 (1992) (adopting the majority rule that “the coercive element” of Hobbs Act extortion under color of official right “is provided by the public office itself”). In other words, the importance of a defendant’s public office or official act to a Hobbs Act charge is its coercive effect on the payor. Accordingly, after reviewing the legislative history and evaluating competing constructions of the statute, the Supreme Court held in Evans that to prove a conviction for extortion under color of official right, “the Government need only show that a public official has obtained a payment to which he was not entitled, knowing that the payment was made in return for official acts.” 504 U.S. at 268. We interpreted Evans in United States v. Antico, 275 F.3d 245 (3d Cir. 2001), and explained that “no ‘official act’ . 7 . . need be proved to convict under the Hobbs Act.” Id. at 257. Rather, we focus on (1) the motivation of the payor, that is, whether a payment “was made in return for official acts,” and (2) whether the defendant knew the payor’s motivation. Id. (emphasis added) (quoting Evans, 504 U.S. at 268) (internal quotation marks omitted). As such, in Antico, we approved a district court’s instruction that the jury had to decide “whether the giver gave the payments . . . because he believed the defendant would use his office for acts not properly related to his official duty.” Id. at 259 (underline added). Similarly, in United States v. Urban, 404 F.3d 754 (3d Cir. 2005), we upheld a Hobbs Act conviction where the government adduced substantial evidence that (1) the payors made payments to the defendants knowing they were “public officials exercising governmental authority”; (2) the payors “made payments in order to assure advantageous exercise of that government authority”; and (3) the defendants “knew that the [payors’] payments were made for an improper purpose, i.e., the influencing of their governmental authority.” Id. at 769. In other decisions, however, we have expressly identified another consideration in our official right extortion inquiry: whether the payor’s belief was reasonable. This line of cases began with our en banc decision in United States v. Mazzei, 521 F.2d 639 (3d Cir. 1975) (en banc). There, the defendant, a state senator, received payments in exchange for helping a corporation obtain a lease from a state executive agency. Id. at 641. The defendant argued that he could not have been acting under color of official right because he “had no official power” in that area, and he “never pretended to have any official power.” Id. at 643. We acknowledged that the “defendant had no statutory power as a state senator to 8 control the granting of leases by state executive agencies,” but rejected the defendant’s argument, because “in order to find that defendant acted ‘under color of official right,’ the jury need not have concluded that he had actual de jure power to secure grant of the lease so long as it found that [the payor] held, and defendant exploited, a reasonable belief that the state system so operated that the power in fact of defendant’s office included the effective authority to determine recipients of the state leases here involved.” Id. We recently extended Mazzei in United States v. Bencivengo, 749 F.3d 205 (3d Cir. 2014). There, we upheld a Hobbs Act conviction of the Mayor of Hamilton Township, New Jersey, who accepted payments in exchange for agreeing to influence the awarding of School Board insurance contracts. Id. at 208. We noted that the defendant “had no actual de jure or de facto power over the award” of such contracts, and that unlike in Mazzei, there was no evidence “that [the payor] believed he had such power.” Id. at 212. Nonetheless, we held that Mazzei extended to situations where a payor reasonably believed the defendant possessed “influence,” if not “effective power,” over an exercise of governmental authority. Id. at 212-13. Thus, we concluded, “where a public official has, and agrees to wield, influence over a governmental decision in exchange for financial gain, or where the official’s position could permit such influence, and the victim of an extortion scheme reasonably believes that the public official wields such influence, that is sufficient to sustain a conviction under the Hobbs Act, regardless of whether the official holds any de jure or de facto power over the decision.” Id. Read together, our holdings in Mazzei, Antico, Urban, and Bencivengo, while emphasizing different aspects of the 9 payor’s motivation, are consistent in accounting for the payor’s reasonable belief as a reflection of the coercive effect of the defendant’s official acts. The reason we included in our inquiry the reasonableness of the payor’s belief that the defendant would engage in particular “official acts”— whether by exercising de jure power, de facto power, or “influence”—in Mazzei and Bencivengo but not Antico or Urban is simple: The defendant’s authority to engage in the relevant “official acts” was not contested in Antico or Urban. Both of those cases involved Philadelphia Licenses and Inspections officers who accepted illicit payments in exchange for favorable exercises of their authority, i.e., they rewarded people who paid and punished people who did not. See Urban, 404 F.3d at 760-62; Antico, 275 F.3d at 249.2 Those defendants clearly exercised de jure power over governmental decisions. In contrast, in Mazzei and Bencivengo, the defendants’ authority was contested, as indicated above.3 But in all of these cases, reasonableness was inherent in our inquiry. Thus, our case law articulates a unified standard for official right extortion cases: We will uphold a conviction for Hobbs Act extortion where the evidence indicates (1) that the payor made a payment to the defendant because the payor held a reasonable belief that the defendant would perform official acts in return, and (2) that the defendant knew the payor made the payment because of that belief. 2 One might refer to these as “classic” official right extortion cases. 3 Fountain raises similar arguments here, as explored below. 10