Opinion ID: 77841
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Mere employment Instruction

Text: Khanani and Portlock argue that the district court erred in refusing to give their proposed instruction that mere employment of undocumented workers cannot support a conviction for harboring, encouraging, or inducing aliens to enter or reside illegally in the United States. [3] A critical aspect of both Khanani and Portlock's defense was that they only employed undocumented workers and that mere employment, at most, constitutes a misdemeanor under a separate and uncharged provision of the immigration laws, 8 U.S.C. § 1324a, in contrast to the felony offense of encouragement and harboring, 8 U.S.C. § 1324(a), with which they were charged. The district court's refusal to instruct the jury on the defendants' mere employment theory of defense is reversible error if the requested instruction (1) was correct, (2) was not substantially covered by the court's charge to the jury, and (3) dealt with some point in the trial so important that failure to give the requested instruction seriously impaired the defendant's ability to conduct his defense. See United States v. Anderson, 326 F.3d 1319, 1330 (11th Cir.2003) (citation and internal quotations omitted). A requested theory-of-defense instruction need only be a substantially correct statement of the current law and have some basis in the evidence. United States v. Morris, 20 F.3d 1111, 1116 (11th Cir.1994). We find that failure to give the requested mere employment instruction did not seriously impair the defendants' ability to conduct their defense. If Khanani merely had employed illegal aliens without knowingly encouraging or inducing them to reside in the United States, he would not have committed the elements of the offensesas the court instructed the jury  and Portlock would not have been liable for the offense. See R992 at 5518-22; Pinkerton v. United States, 328 U.S. 640, 645-48, 66 S.Ct. 1180, 1183-84, 90 L.Ed. 1489 (1946) (holding that a co-conspirator could be guilty of a substantive offense even though he did no more than join the conspiracy, provided that the offense was reasonably foreseeable and was committed in furtherance of the conspiracy). The jury instructions regarding the § 1324(a) offenses correctly addressed all elements of the offenses and implicitly acknowledged defendants' theory of defense. The district court was not required to instruct the jury that the employment of illegal aliens in and of itself did not constitute a section 1324(a) offense because the instructions as given already required the United States to prove a level of knowledge and intent beyond the mere employment of illegal aliens.