Opinion ID: 4653353
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Jury-Instruction Claim

Text: To prevail on his jury-instruction claim, Harden needed to show both that counsel’s performance was objectively deﬁcient and that he was prejudiced by it. Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687 (1984). Failure to object to a defective or confusing jury instruction may reﬂect deﬁcient performance. See Cupp v. Naughten, 414 U.S. 141, 146–47 (1973); Baer v. Neal, 879 F.3d 769, 777–79 (7th Cir. 2018). Harden maintains that his trial counsel was ineﬀective for agreeing to a jury instruction that did not explicitly state that his heroin needed to be the “but-for” cause of Schnettler’s death. He insists that the instruction was defective because, although it recited the language from 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B), it did not explain that language. And, because we noted during his direct appeal that the evidence of Schnettler’s cause of death conﬂicted, he sees a reasonable probability that a properly instructed jury would have reached a diﬀerent verdict. In our view, though, Harden has met neither of the two prongs of the Strickland test. No. 20-1154 9 To begin, Harden cannot show that counsel performed deﬁciently. He relies on Burrage v. United States, 571 U.S. 204 (2014), to argue that counsel agreed to a defective jury instruction. He views Burrage as requiring an explicit “but-for” instruction before a defendant may receive a death-enhanced sentence under § 841(b)(1)(B). But in Burrage the Supreme Court held only that a defendant cannot receive a death-enhanced sentence unless his drugs were an “independently suﬃcient” cause of death, not simply a “contributing cause,” as some circuits had ruled. Id. at 218–19. Embracing the statute’s text, the Court reasoned that “[t]he language Congress enacted requires death to ‘result from’ use of the unlawfully distributed drug, not from a combination of factors to which the drug use merely contributed.” Id. at 216. Precisely because it highlighted the importance of the text, Burrage did not state that an instruction using the “result from” text of § 841(b)(1)(B) was defective. In light of Burrage and the facts of this case, counsel’s performance was not deﬁcient. First, in the context of this case, the instruction was a correct statement of the law. Because no evidence would have led the jury to ﬁnd that heroin was merely a “contributing” cause of Harden’s death, competent counsel would not suspect that the instruction might be confusing. Also, this court previously found no fault in an instruction identical to the one Harden challenges, so counsel had no reason to deviate from it. The last time we considered a death-results instruction, we rejected an attempt to embellish the statutory language, explaining that the statute “was a good deal clearer than the addition and probably clear enough.” United States v. Hatﬁeld, 591 F.3d 945, 949 (7th Cir. 2010). True, Hatﬁeld was decided before Burrage. But Burrage did not abrogate it. To the contrary, Burrage cited Hatﬁeld 10 No. 20-1154 favorably. See Burrage, 571 U.S. at 211. Harden replies that Krieger v. United States, 842 F.3d 490 (7th Cir. 2016), has since undermined Hatﬁeld. But, as he admits, Krieger was not a jury-instruction case. There, we vacated a death-enhanced sentence because the sentencing order was so “awash in confusion about what causation means” that we could not tell if the district court had used the correct standard. Id. at 501. The confusion was compounded by “a lack of clarity in the case law at the time about what type of causation was required.” Id. at 502. Since Hatﬁeld, we have not revisited whether a death-results instruction requires more than the statutory text. And Krieger was decided after Harden’s trial, so counsel cannot be faulted for not using it as a basis for an objection.  Harden also attempts to draw support from three out-ofcircuit cases for the proposition that counsel’s failure to demand an elaboration on § 841(b)(1)(B)’s statutory text can be reversible error. See Santillana v. Upton, 846 F.3d 779, 785 (5th Cir. 2017); United States v. Alvarado, 816 F.3d 242, 248–49 (4th Cir. 2016); United States v. MacKay, 610 Fed. App’x 797, 799 (10th Cir. 2015). But Alvarado actually approved an unadorned “death-results” instruction like the one in this case and commented only that, in a mixed-toxicity case (like the other two As we make clear, counsel was not ineﬀective for agreeing to the jury instruction that tracked the language of the statute and our prior opinion in Hatﬁeld. In light of Burrage, we invite our Circuit’s Pattern Criminal Jury Instruction Committee to consider adding a pattern jury instruction for the death-results provision in 21 U.S.C. § 841(b)(1)(B) and evaluate whether some deviation from the language in the statute would be appropriate in certain circumstances. No. 20-1154 11 that Harden cites), “a court’s refusal to clarify the phrase ‘results from’ might become a problem.” 816 F.3d at 248–49. Schnettler died from the toxicity of a single drug, so the concern of those cases is absent here. Even if counsel’s stipulation to the instruction were deﬁcient, Harden cannot show that he was prejudiced by it. He insists that the jury’s single question to the court (“can we factor in other possibilities”) shows that jurors did not understand the death-results instruction. But the question has none of the required context. See Cupp, 414 U.S. at 146. And as discussed above, nothing about the context of this trial suggests that, like in Burrage, the jury believed that it could hold the defendant liable for a death if heroin was only a “contributing cause.” Rather, the trial focused on competing timelines of the heroin delivery. Dr. Giese, the only witness who testiﬁed about causation, stated that Schnettler died from a heroin overdose. Her testimony highlighted that Harden’s liability depended on when Schnettler had received heroin from Peterson: if he used it by 5:00 p.m. on the day of his death, as Harden contended, rather than around 7:30 p.m. as the government countered, then it would be “a little bit surprising” for him to have overdosed on it and still be texting friends at 8:00 p.m. And during closing arguments the parties emphasized that the issue before the jury depended on its evaluation of the competing evidence of when Schnettler received and used Harden’s heroin. Thus, the absence of a “but-for” deﬁnition on the instruction does not undermine conﬁdence in the verdict. Strickland, 466 U.S. at 686. 12 No. 20-1154