Opinion ID: 187016
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Effective Bifurcation of Charge

Text: Brown's final argument is that, in contravention of circuit precedent, the district court's disjunctive jury instruction effectively treated the firearm and the ammunition it contained as two separate offenses. In United States v. Clark, 184 F.3d 858, 871-72 (D.C.Cir.1999), this Court held that possession of a loaded weapon constitutes a single offense under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), and reversed one of two convictions a jury had returned when it found a defendant guilty of possessing a loaded firearm in violation of that statute. Brown argues that, in function, the district court here bifurcated the charge when it allowed the disjunctive instruction and repeatedly referred to possession of the firearm and possession of ammunition as separate counts when discussing the charges. Brown asserts that the court gave the jury the impression that a loaded weapon constituted more than one offense and thereby violated this Court's precedent. We disagree. In Clark, the fundamental issue was not a court's implicit division of possession of ammunition and possession of a firearm into separate counts, but an actual indictment and conviction on two separate counts of violating 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1) for possession of a single loaded firearm. Clark 's defendant was indicted for two counts of violating § 922(g)(1): one count for possessing a firearm and a second count for possessing the ammunition inside. Id. at 862-63. While not even discussed specifically, to the extent that Clark 's jury instruction was flawed for permitting such a double conviction, the flaw resulted from the improper indictment. Clark involved two separate counts of conviction, but does not speak to the issue of whether the two grounds within a single count need to be charged with a conjunctive and or can be charged with a disjunctive or. Here, Brown was indicted for one violation of § 922(g)(1), and we reject his argument that the district court's discussion of two possibilities for violating that statute as separate counts rises to the same level as the Clark district court's permission of separate convictions for a single violation of § 922(g)(1). The English language lacks a precise, simple term that courts may use to refer to each act in a disjunctively phrased criminal statute, so the district court's slight lapse in referring to each of the two elements as counts is understandable. But, more importantly, we fail to see that use of this terminology led to jury confusion about the nature of the crime with which Brown was chargedspecifically on the question of whether the two acts constituted separate substantive counts of violating § 922(g)(1). The verdict form the court submitted to the jury clearly showed the members that they could find Brown guilty of violating the statute either by finding that he unlawfully possessed a firearm, unlawfully possessed ammunition, or both. The jury correctly completed the form by marking that it unanimously found Brown guilty by reason of his possession of ammunition while reflecting that it came to no conclusion on the question of his possession of a firearm option by leaving that space blank. We see no evidence that they considered the two questions as belonging to separate offenses. Finally, while Brown argues that the court even went so far as to send the jury back to deliberate further when the verdict form was blank with respect to the firearm portion of Count I in support of his argument that the court implied to the jury that the two elements were distinct substantive counts, the record shows that the district court sent the jury back to deliberate primarily because the foreperson appeared confused about what the jury had actually decided on this count. In any case, when the jury subsequently returned and presented a coherent oral verdict, the court accepted its verdict form with the firearm possession section left blank. This demonstrates both that the district court did not require the jury to return verdicts on both acts and that the jury correctly understood that arriving at such a verdict was not required to find the defendant guilty on that count.