Opinion ID: 1384716
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Remaining Arguments Are Without Merit

Text: Matthews asserts that it was legal error to allow the jury to consider overt acts occurring before the initiation of grand jury proceedings. He maintains that acts occurring before he became aware of the grand jury proceedings could not have furthered a conspiracy whose charged object was to impair the firearm's availability for use in an official proceeding. We review this forfeited argument for plain error. Allen, 390 F.3d at 952; Fed.R.Crim.P. 52(b). In making this argument, Matthews all but ignores § 1512(f)(1), which provides that an official proceeding need not be pending or about to be instituted at the time of the offense. This plainly means that a defendant may obstruct justice in violation of § 1512(c)(1) even before a judicial proceeding is ongoing. As we stated above, a defendant may obstruct justice under § 1512(c)(1) if he believes that his acts will be likely to affect a foreseeable proceeding. See Arthur Andersen, 544 U.S. at 707, 125 S.Ct. 2129; Kaplan, 490 F.3d at 125. Since the government supplied ample evidenceincluding Matthews's own recorded statementsto support its claim that Matthews thought judicial proceedings likely if he did not dispose of the firearm, it was not plain error to submit the challenged overt acts to the jury for consideration. Matthews also argues that the conspiracy instruction was flawed because it did not specify the crime he conspired to commit or identify the object of the conspiracy. Rather than simply excerpting the language of the indictment, the instruction incorporates the counts of the indictment by reference. As the jury had access to the indictment, that was entirely proper. [4]