Opinion ID: 3027522
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Jury Instructions on Co-

Text: Conspirator Guilty Pleas Rivas claims that the court improperly instructed the jury on the use of Culler’s and Johnson’s guilty pleas. The court instructed the jury that “Darrin Culler and Juan Johnson may be considered to be alleged accomplices in this case. The fact that an alleged accomplice has entered a plea of guilt in this case, is not evidence of the guilt of any other person, including the defendant.” (App. at 167.) Rivas argues that this instruction improperly permitted the jury to infer his guilt from the guilty pleas. Although it is true that a jury may not do that, see United States v. Universal Rehabilitation Servs. (PA), Inc., 205 F.3d 657, 668 (3d Cir. 2003); United States v. Gaev, 24 F.3d 473, 478 (3d Cir. 1994), one is hard pressed to see how the instruction was unclear on this point given that it explicitly said the pleas were not evidence of Rivas’s guilt. He suggests that the jury might have used this roundabout reasoning: because the pleas are not evidence of the guilt of “any other person,” they must be evidence of Culler and Johnson’s guilt. But Culler and Johnson pleaded guilty to conspiring with Rivas. Cf. Universal Rehab., 205 F.3d at 671 (Roth, J., dissenting) (“If two defendants allegedly conspired, and one defendant has been convicted or has pleaded guilty, the clear implication is that the other defendant is also guilty.”) Aha, Rivas’s hypothetical jury concludes, the pleas are therefore evidence that Rivas is guilty, despite the clear instruction stating that they are not. To follow such reasoning the jury would have to possess an unlikely combination of shrewdness (to invent the argument) and obtuseness (to ignore the obvious meaning of the instruction). We have previously held it was error to instruct the jury that although a co-conspirator’s guilty plea was not evidence of the defendant’s guilt, the plea could nonetheless be used as the jury “saw fit” in accordance with “common sense,” remaining studiously vague about what such a use would be. United States v. Toner, 173 F.2d 140, 142 (3d Cir. 1949); see also Universal Rehab., 205 F.3d at 670-71 (Roth, J., dissenting) 9 (discussing Toner). But that instruction clearly invited misuse of the pleas while paying lip-service to proper evidence law; the alleged flaw in the present instruction is much less clear. At any rate, even assuming there was error, there was no plain error. The parties only used the pleas appropriately, to impeach Culler and Johnson. Having failed to object to the instruction below, the burden is on Rivas to prove that the jury in fact adopted the unlikely reasoning described above. He has not done so.