Opinion ID: 806713
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Original Appeal

Text: Because the complete factual history is extensively set out in Whitfield, we only summarize the relevant procedural history. In 2007, a jury found Appellants guilty on all charges. Minor received 132 months of imprisonment to be followed by three years of supervised release, was fined $2.75 million ($250,000 for each of his eleven counts of conviction), and, along with Teel, was ordered to pay $1.5 million as restitution to United States Fidelity and Guaranty (“USF&G”), the victim of the Minor/Teel bribery scheme. In addition to the restitution order, Teel received seventy months of imprisonment and two years of supervised release. Whitfield received 110 months of imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and a $125,000 fine. In Whitfield, however, we concluded that the district court committed plain error when it denied Appellants’ motions for judgment of acquittal under Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 29 on the 18 U.S.C. § 666 counts of the indictment. Accordingly, we reversed all of the convictions related to federal program bribery in violation of § 666, including Minor and Teel’s convictions for conspiracy to commit federal program bribery. However, we affirmed each remaining count of conviction, specifically, Appellants’ convictions for honestservices mail and wire fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343, and 1346,2 1 As stated in their opening and reply briefs, Whitfield and Teel join Minor in the challenges to the indictment and the jury instructions, and adopt the relevant portions from Minor’s opening and reply briefs accordingly. However, while Minor and Whitfield also raise various appellate issues stemming from their resentencings, Teel, who has completed his imprisonment term, does not. 2 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341 and 1343 criminalize the use of the mails or wires, respectively, in furtherance of “any scheme or artifice to defraud, or for obtaining money or property by means of false or fraudulent pretenses, representations, or promises.” 18 U.S.C. § 1346 defines the term “scheme or artifice to defraud” to include “a scheme or artifice to deprive another of the intangible right of honest services.” 2 Case: 11-60509 Document: 00511956680 Page: 3 Date Filed: 08/14/2012 No. 11-60509 Minor and Whitfield’s convictions for conspiracy in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 371, and Minor’s conviction for racketeering in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1962(c). In light of the foregoing, we vacated each Appellant’s sentence and remanded the case for resentencing. Thereafter, Minor unsuccessfully petitioned this court for rehearing, and each Appellant unsuccessfully petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. On remand for resentencing, Minor, joined by Whitfield and Teel, filed in the district court a motion to vacate their convictions in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Skilling v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2896 (2010). Appellants argued that Skilling was an intervening change of law by a controlling authority that rendered the indictment and jury instructions erroneous. After receiving supplemental briefing and hearing argument, the district court denied Appellants’ motion. The district court then resentenced Appellants. Whitfield received seventy-five months of imprisonment and two years of supervised release. Teel received fifty-one months of imprisonment and two years of supervised release. Minor received ninety-six months imprisonment3 to be followed by three years of supervised release, and was fined $2 million ($250,000 for each of his eight remaining counts of conviction). Also, as before, Minor and Teel were ordered jointly and severally to pay restitution to USF&G. This timely appeal followed. II. Current Appeal: Convictions and Law of the Case Between the original appeal and the current appeal, the Supreme Court decided Skilling. In that case, Defendant Jeffrey Skilling (“Skilling”) was charged with and convicted of, inter alia, conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. See id. at 2908. Specifically, according to the indictment, “Skilling 3 Whitfield’s second imprisonment sentence was, in total, thirty-five months lower than his original sentence, Teel’s imprisonment sentence was nineteen months lower, and Minor’s imprisonment sentence was thirty-six months lower. 3 Case: 11-60509 Document: 00511956680 Page: 4 Date Filed: 08/14/2012 No. 11-60509 had sought to ‘depriv[e] Enron and its shareholders of the intangible right of [his] honest services.’” Id. (alterations in original). The Supreme Court granted certiorari to address whether Skilling’s conviction for conspiracy to commit honest-services wire fraud was improper: “We . . . consider whether Skilling’s conspiracy conviction was premised on an improper theory of honest-services wire fraud. The honest-services statute, § 1346, Skilling maintains, is unconstitutionally vague. Alternatively, he contends that his conduct does not fall within the statute’s compass.” Id. at 2925-26. The Court determined that § 1346 is not unconstitutionally vague, but that its reach is limited to bribery and kickback schemes, not other conduct, such as conflict-of-interest schemes. Id. at 2930-34. Appellants argue that Skilling changed the law of honest-services fraud to render both the jury instructions and the indictment in this case erroneous. Specifically, Appellants allege that the jury instructions were erroneous because they incorporated the Mississippi-state-law definition of bribery. In addition, Appellants allege that the indictment failed to state an offense under § 1346 because instead of charging bribery under federal law, the relevant counts charged that “honest services” are those “performed free from deceit, bias, selfdealing, and concealment.” In this way, Appellants continue, the indictment charged a conflict-of-interest scheme, which Skilling specifically excludes from § 1346’s compass. According to Appellants, each of these errors independently requires reversal of their convictions. These arguments implicate the law-of-the-case doctrine. Under that doctrine, the district court on remand, or the appellate court on a subsequent appeal, abstains from reexamining an issue of fact or law that has already been decided on appeal. See, e.g., United States v. Carales-Villalta, 617 F.3d 342, 344 (5th Cir. 2010). A facet or corollary of the law-of-the-case doctrine is the mandate rule. See United States v. Becerra, 155 F.3d 740, 753 (5th Cir. 1998), 4 Case: 11-60509 Document: 00511956680 Page: 5 Date Filed: 08/14/2012 No. 11-60509 abrogated on other grounds by United States v. Booker, 543 U.S. 220 (2005). Under the mandate rule, “[a] district court on remand ‘must implement both the letter and the spirit of the appellate court’s mandate and may not disregard the explicit directives of that court.’” United States v. McCrimmon, 443 F.3d 454, 459 (5th Cir. 2006) (quoting United States v. Matthews, 312 F.3d 652, 657 (5th Cir. 2002)). Accordingly, the mandate rule “prohibits a district court on remand from reexamining an issue of law or fact previously decided on appeal and not resubmitted to the trial court on remand. This prohibition covers issues decided both expressly and by necessary implication . . . .” United States v. Pineiro, 470 F.3d 200, 205 (5th Cir. 2006) (per curiam). “Additionally, pursuant to the ‘waiver approach’ to the mandate rule,” McCrimmon, 443 F.3d at 459, “‘[a]ll other issues not arising out of this court’s ruling and not raised before the appeals court, which could have been brought in the original appeal, are not proper for reconsideration by the district court below,’” Pineiro, 470 F.3d at 205 (citation omitted). See also United States v. Lee, 358 F.3d 315, 321 (5th Cir. 2004) (“Absent exceptional circumstances, the mandate rule compels compliance on remand with the dictates of a superior court and forecloses relitigation of issues expressly or impliedly decided by the appellate court. Moreover, the rule bars litigation of issues decided by the district court but foregone on appeal or otherwise waived, for example because they were not raised in the district court.”). “We review de novo a district court’s application of the remand order, including whether the law-of-the-case doctrine or mandate rule forecloses the district court’s actions on remand.” Carales-Villalta, 617 F.3d at 344. Both the law-of-the-case doctrine and the mandate rule are discretionary practices, not jurisdictional rules, and they are subject to an exception Appellants urge here: that “there has been an intervening change of law by a controlling authority.” Matthews, 312 F.3d at 657. Appellants contend that 5 Case: 11-60509 Document: 00511956680 Page: 6 Date Filed: 08/14/2012 No. 11-60509 their challenges to the jury instructions and the indictment were properly before the district court on remand for resentencing because Skilling satisfies the intervening-change-of-law exception. We disagree. Appellants argue that, after Skilling, § 1346 criminalizes only bribery and kickbacks under federal law, thereby specifically excluding bribery and kickbacks under state law. According to Appellants, by the Skilling Court’s stating that its “construction of § 1346 ‘establish[es] a uniform national standard,” 130 S. Ct. at 2933 (alteration in original), the Court could only have meant federal law. A fair reading of Skilling, however, reveals that the Court was establishing a uniform national standard by construing § 1346 to clearly exclude conduct outside of bribery and kickbacks, such as conflict-of-interest schemes, not to establish federal law as the uniform national standard for the elements of bribery and kickbacks in § 1346 prosecutions.4 Moreover, the Skilling Court further asserted that “[o]verlap with other federal statutes does not render § 1346 superfluous. The principal federal bribery statute, [18 U.S.C.] § 201, for example, generally applies only to federal public officials, so § 1346’s application to state and local corruption and to private sector fraud reaches misconduct that might otherwise go unpunished.” Id. at 2934 n.45 (emphasis added). Accordingly, we read Skilling as recognizing that § 1346 prosecutions may involve misconduct that is also a violation of state law. In Whitfield, we recognized that “the district court based its definition of bribery in the jury charge on the Mississippi offense of bribery,” and that the “jury charge was also consistent with the language of the Fifth Circuit Pattern 4 Additionally, it is notable that in Black v. United States, 130 S. Ct. 2963 (2010), a companion case to Skilling decided the same day, the Supreme Court stated that it had “decided in Skilling that § 1346, properly confined, criminalizes only schemes to defraud that involve bribes or kickbacks.” Id. at 2968. If Skilling had indeed held that § 1346 criminalizes only schemes to defraud that involve bribes or kickbacks under federal law, it is only reasonable that the Court would have said as much in Black. 6 Case: 11-60509 Document: 00511956680 Page: 7 Date Filed: 08/14/2012 No. 11-60509 Jury Instructions on ‘Bribery of a Public Official’ under 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(1) and ‘Receiving Bribe by Public Official’ under 18 U.S.C. § 201(b)(2).” 590 F.3d at 348. Moreover, we made clear that “in order to constitute a federal crime, the state statute must concern ‘something close to bribery’ and . . . ‘the mere violation of a gratuity statute . . . will not suffice.’” Id. (citing United States v. Brumley, 116 F.3d 728, 734 (5th Cir. 1997) (en banc)). Accordingly, Whitfield was fully consonant with Skilling, and nothing in the Skilling opinion suggests that our analysis of the jury instructions in Whitfield was incorrect. To the contrary, Skilling cites approvingly to Whitfield for our analysis of the district court’s jury instructions regarding bribery. 130 S. Ct. at 2934. Furthermore, although Skilling changed the law of honest-services fraud to exclude the conflict-of-interest category of cases from § 1346’s scope, see id. at 2931-32, this is not an intervening change of law as applied to the facts of this case because Appellants were charged with bribery schemes. Indeed, as we observed in Whitfield, this case involved “two prolonged bribery schemes spanning nearly four years each.”5 590 F.3d at 352. The mere inclusion of the “performed free from deceit, bias, self-dealing, and concealment” language did not transform the bribery schemes charged in the indictment into conflict-ofinterest schemes. Based on the foregoing, the intervening-change-of-law exception is inapplicable to this case. Accordingly, the mandate rule bars litigation of these arguments.6 See Pineiro, 470 F.3d at 205; McCrimmon, 443 F.3d at 459. We 5 In the instant appeal, Appellants attempt to re-litigate whether they were guilty of any wrongdoing. In fact, they even re-urge that Minor’s transactions with Whitfield and Teel were constitutionally protected political campaign contributions that qualified for First Amendment protection. We decline Appellants’ invitation to entertain this attempted “second bite at the apple.” See, e.g., Carales-Villalta, 617 F.3d at 344-45; United States v. Slanina, 359