Opinion ID: 220729
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Were the Pinkerton instructions misleading?

Text: Both appellants contend that the district court erred in twice giving the jury a Pinkerton instruction because doing so could have misled the jury. When an appellant claims that a jury instruction would tend[] to confuse or mislead the jury on the controlling issues, we review for abuse of discretion. United States v. Silva, 554 F.3d 13, 21 (1st Cir.2009) (quoting United States v. Ranney, 298 F.3d 74, 79 (1st Cir.2002) (internal quotation marks omitted)). In assessing a challenge to a trial court's jury instructions, we must bear in mind that [a] trial judge has broad discretion in deciding how best to communicate complicated legal rules to a lay jury. DeCaro v. Hasbro, Inc., 580 F.3d 55, 63 (1st Cir.2009). In addition, [w]hen reviewing a district court's instructions to the jury, we look at the charge as a whole, not in isolated fragments. United States v. Taylor, 54 F.3d 967, 976 (1st Cir.1995); United States v. Garcia-Pastrana, 584 F.3d 351, 385 (1st Cir.2009). A Pinkerton instruction tells the jury that they may hold a defendant liable for a criminal offense in which the defendant did not personally participate if it was committed during the course of and in furtherance of the conspiracy of which he was a member. See Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U.S. 640, 645-48, 66 S.Ct. 1180, 90 L.Ed. 1489 (1946); United States v. Hansen, 434 F.3d 92, 103 (1st Cir.2006). The district court gave the jury a Pinkerton instruction once when instructing on counts 29 and 30, and again when instructing on counts 3, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Both Newell and Parisi objected before the court instructed the jury, and Parisi objected again after the instructions were given. Appellants argue that by giving the Pinkerton instruction twice, the court created an undue risk that the jury would draw the inference that a person who had committed the substantive offense must have been a conspirator as well. See United States v. Sanchez, 917 F.2d 607, 612 n. 4 (1st Cir.1990) (cautioning against automatically providing a Pinkerton instruction in cases where the jury is being asked . . . to infer, on the basis of a series of disparate criminal acts, that a conspiracy existed). But see United States v. Wester, 90 F.3d 592, 597 (1st Cir.1996) (rejecting challenge to Pinkerton instruction on grounds that in some cases some interplay between the jury's assessment of guilt on the substantive counts and the conspiracy charge is both natural and appropriate, and that the fact that substantive crimes were carried out by the defendants, following discussions between them, may well make the fact of agreement more likely). As the government notes, the two Pinkerton instructions were not duplicative, but rather were addressed to two distinct sets of offensesthe misapplication of tribal funds in counts 29 and 30 and the misapplication of government and health care funds in counts 3, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Even if giving the instruction twice created a risk that the jury would improperly infer the existence of a conspiracy, there was a converse risk that failing to adequately instruct the jury that vicarious liability was available on these distinct sets of charges would itself have misled the jury. (The appellants do not contend that Pinkerton liability was in fact impermissible on either set of charges). Moreover, it is worth bearing in mind that the appellants were facing a thirty-count indictment, alleging violations of five separate statutes in dozens of transactions occurring over the span of approximately four years. The trial took eleven days, and the jury instructions alone occupy approximately forty pages in the trial transcript. Under these circumstances, it was well within the court's discretion to decide whether providing the Pinkerton instruction twice would serve to clarify or to confuse.