Opinion ID: 613898
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Phillips Instruction

Text: Though Phillips is a Tenth Circuit case dealing with the sufficiency of the evidence rather than jury instructions, the government does not dispute that it correctly states the law, and we agree. Furthermore, because the proposed instruction focused directly on Archer's defense (that he was unaware of the false statements) and because, had the jury believed that defense, it would have been required to acquit him, the only issue before us is whether the charge the court actually gave adequately represented the requirements of knowledge as an element of the crime. See Quattrone, 441 F.3d at 179-80 (vacating and remanding for failure to instruct regarding lack of knowledge); United States v. Dove, 916 F.2d 41, 45 (2d Cir. 1990) (holding that unbalanced instructions, which explain how certain evidence may be inculpatory but not exculpatory, are insufficient, especially when the defendant's theory of defense is that the government failed to prove an element of the crime). Put another way, for Archer to show that the substance of his requested charge was not effectively presented elsewhere, he must show that the jury could have convicted him under the instructions given by the court even if it believed his defense of lack of knowledge. Quattrone, 441 F.3d at 180. To resolve this issue, we compare the requested charge with the one given. Phillips involved a solo practitioner charged with immigration fraud. The defendant and his assistant, who was also his wife, were convicted of forging documents. On appeal, the defendant challenged the sufficiency of the evidence establishing his knowledge of the forgeries. The court said that without some evidence showing how the attorney supervised his office, the mere fact that he was a solo practitioner was insufficient to support the inference that he was aware of the fraud. To find otherwise, it said, would be to hold such lawyers to something approaching strict criminal liability for the acts of their employees, contrary to what the law requires. [4] 543 F.3d at 1209. The Phillips court, however, found sufficient evidence to sustain the conviction in the case before it for two reasons: (a) the employee in question was also the attorney's wife, which enabled the jury to infer that a closer-than-typical office relationship existed between them, and (b) the government had direct proof that he had forged one of the many documents involved. Id. at 1209-10. Relying on Phillips, Archer asked that the court instruct the jury that [t]he fact that one of the defendants is the sole attorney in a small firm in and of itself is not sufficient to determine that the attorney was aware of each and every act that took place in the office or that he approved or encouraged such actions. The court declined, opting instead to give the following instruction with respect to mens rea: To act knowingly means to act intentionally and voluntarily, and not because of ignorance, mistake, accident, or carelessness. In deciding whether a defendant acted knowingly, you should ask yourself whether the defendant knew that the visa application document you are considering contained a false statement? And did that defendant, nonetheless, present the document ...? On its face, the district court's instruction accurately describes the knowingly element of the charged offense. See, e.g., United States v. Doyle, 130 F.3d 523, 540 (2d Cir.1997); United States v. Hopkins, 53 F.3d 533, 541 (2d Cir.1995). And that instruction leaves no room for the jury to convict Archer if it believed that he merely ran an office from which fraudulent documents were filed. Resisting this conclusion, however, Archer claims that the court's refusal to give the Phillips instruction prejudiced him because the government, in its rebuttal summation, asserted that Archer had to have known about the fraud because the office was small and it's his law firm. This, he says, is precisely the type of reasoning against which the Phillips instruction would have cautioned the jury. Archer's argument, however, goes too far: the Phillips instruction, properly construed, does not prohibit the jury from considering the fact that an attorney is a solo practitioner as one piece of circumstantial evidence from which, along with other evidence, it can infer the attorney's knowledge. What it does do is prohibit the jury from relying on that fact in isolation. Here, the prosecutor did not ask the jury to rely only on Archer's status as a solo practitioner. Rather, immediately thereafter, she recounted the contents of the audio tapes and the testimony of the trial witnesses; that is, she pointed to other evidence that, together with his being a solo practitioner, might lead the jury to find that Archer did have actual knowledge. [5] In this respect, the government's case has much in common with that upheld in Phillips, where the attorney's status as a solo practitioner was also just one piece of the evidentiary pie. 543 F.3d at 1210.