Opinion ID: 1985092
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Fifth and Ninth Circuit Approach

Text: In United States v. Chagra, supra, 807 F.2d 398, the defendant, along with others, was charged with conspiracy to murder a Federal judge, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1111 (murder), 1114 (killing a Federal officer or employee), and 1117 (conspiracy to murder). Initially, the charge was conspiracy to commit first degree murder, of which she was convicted. When that conviction was overturned on appeal because of faulty jury instructions dealing with premeditation, a superseding indictment was filed charging Chagra with conspiracy to commit second degree murder. Upon her conviction of that charge, she contended on appeal that no such crime existed because second degree murder is necessarily an unplanned murder, devoid of premeditation, and one cannot plan an unplanned event. Like petitioner here, she argued that the agreement necessary to a conspiracy and premeditation were sufficiently the same that one cannot exist without the other. Id. at 401. That argument, the court held, was based on the incorrect assumption that, to constitute a conspiracy to commit first degree murder, the agreement itself must be premeditated, which was not the case. What is required, the court said, is that the defendant agree with another to commit an illegal objective and that, at the time of the agreement, the defendant also have the state of mind required to commit the substantive crime. Although those two states of mind are almost always one, or tend to collapse into one, the inquiries must be made separately. Id. The Government was entitled to prove that, at the moment of conspiratorial agreement, Chagra's intent to kill the judge was impulsive and with malice aforethought. Id. An impulsive killing, it continued, nonetheless constitutes the intentional taking of life and, when coupled with malice aforethought, is second degree murder. In that setting, the element of agreement and the requisite intent to commit the substantive offense were in harmony and were not mutually exclusive requirements of proof. Id. The court rejected the argument that one cannot plan an unplanned event by rejecting what it regarded as the underpinning of the argumentthat one cannot possess the intent to kill impulsively at some future time. The focus of conspiracy, it said, was on the agreement and the defendant's intent at the time of the agreement, and, in that regard, the court observed that the state of mind can certainly be to impulsively kill such as, `yes! let's kill the judge.' Id. at 402. The view of the Chagra court was accepted, without discussion, in United States v. Croft, supra, 124 F.3d 1109. The defendants, charged with conspiracy to murder the U.S. Attorney, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1111, 1114, and 1117, complained on appeal that the instructions to the jury omitted the element of premeditation. The court noted that § 1111(a) included both first and second degree murder, that the indictment did not allege premeditation, that it therefore charged only conspiracy to commit second degree murder, and, citing Chagra, that it is logically possible to conspire to commit second degree murder. Id. at 1122-23. The Ninth Circuit court did not discuss any rationale for that view but, we presume, tacitly accepted the reasoning of the Chagra court. So far as we can tell, Chagra and Croft are the only two currently viable cases actually holding, after some consideration of the issue, that conspiracy to commit second degree murder constitutes a common law crime. There are two other cases, however, that bear mention in this regard. In State v. Arnold, 98 N.C.App. 518, 392 S.E.2d 140 (1990), the defendant was convicted of second degree murder, as an accessory before the fact, and conspiracy to commit first degree murder. On appeal she argued that the conspiracy charge should have been dismissed since it is legally impossible to conspire to commit second degree murder. Id. at 150. Despite that articulation of the complaint, however, the issue actually framed was not the one now before us, but seemed to be based more on an asserted inconsistency between the conspiracy charge, alleging an agreement to commit first degree murder, and the actual murder conviction, which was for second degree. The court concluded that, as the conspiracy occurs when the agreement is made, it is not affected by the degree of the substantive crime actually committed, and that the verdicts were therefore not inconsistent. Implicitly, and quite correctly, the court necessarily concluded that it was legally possible for one to conspire to commit first degree murder even though the crime actually committed amounts only to second degree murder. See also State v. Leonardo, 119 R.I. 7, 375 A.2d 1388 (1977), to the same effect.