Opinion ID: 196657
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Jury Instruction on Good Faith Defense

Text: 46 Defendants challenge the district court's refusal to give a proposed instruction to acquit on wire fraud if the jury found that the defendant had a good faith belief that his status as a Native American entitled him to freely pass the United States-Canadian border without paying any form of taxes on the goods he was carrying. The proposed instruction would not have required the jury to find, as the district court instructed instead, that their good faith belief was objectively reasonable. We need not decide the challenge to the jury instruction, because the wire fraud convictions based on the scheme to defraud Canadian authorities of taxes and duties have been reversed. 47 True, charges under a second theory of wire fraud (depriving citizens on the reservation of the honest services of their police chief) have been affirmed. If refusing to give the proposed instruction relating to aboriginal rights were error, it might have infected the jury's assessment of defendants' intent on these additional counts as well. However, defendants' argument is grounded in the first theory of wire fraud alone; they say that to the extent that this case is about having the specific intent to violate Canadian tax laws, it is analogous to certain federal tax offense cases, in which an instruction that good faith must be objectively reasonable is inappropriate. See Cheek v. United States, 498 U.S. 192, 203, 111 S.Ct. 604, 611, 112 L.Ed.2d 617 (1991). Given our reversal of the tax-related charges, defendants' initially weak contention is not even arguably tenable. In any case, the district court went beyond the legal minimums in instructing the jury that it could consider good faith as a defense. Cf. United States v. Dockray, 943 F.2d 152, 155 (1st Cir.1991) ([W]here the court properly instructs the jury on the element of intent to defraud--essentially the opposite of good faith--a separate instruction on good faith is not required.).