Opinion ID: 4171312
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Denial of Request to Issue Jury Instruction

Text: Ross and Kingsley also contend that the district court erred in declining to give the jury instruction on circumstantial evidence proposed by Ross. In his proposed instruction, Ross sought to have the jury instructed that “[i]f the prosecution’s evidence gives equal or nearly equal circumstantial support to competing explanations for an element of a charge, one consistent with the prosecution’s theory of guilt but the other an equally plausible innocent reason for the same facts as offered by the defense, then you must necessarily entertain a reasonable doubt as to the truth of an element of the charge and, therefore, find the defendant not guilty.” J.A. 34.31-.32. We disagree that the refusal to give this instruction was erroneous. 7 Ross and Kingsley argue that the instruction was required pursuant to this Court’s decision in United States v. Glenn, 312 F.3d 58, 70 (2d Cir. 2002). We disagree, and view Glenn as inapposite. As the district court pointed out, Glenn did not address jury instructions at all, nor the evaluation of circumstantial evidence in support of discrete elements of a charge. Instead, that case addressed a Rule 29 challenge to the overall sufficiency of the evidence in a case involving no direct evidence of the defendant’s guilt. See id. at 63 (citing Fed. R. Crim. P. 29). The government’s case here included ample direct evidence, as the district court observed, including the testimony of cooperating witnesses that Kingsley and Ross were directly involved in both “smurfing” and in the “cooking” process. The district court instructed the jury that the government bore the burden of proving each element of the four charges beyond a reasonable doubt. It did not err in declining to issue an inapposite instruction, which could only have confused the jury in its evaluation of the evidence.