Opinion ID: 4543021
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Foreign Law Evidence

Text: The appellants next take issue with two of the district court's evidentiary decisions concerning foreign law. First, they contend that the court violated Federal Rule of Evidence 403 by precluding them from introducing evidence or questioning witnesses about whether commercial bribery is lawful in Brazil and Paraguay. [S]o long as the district court has conscientiously balanced the proffered evidence's probative value with the risk for prejudice, its conclusion [to preclude evidence pursuant to Federal Rule of Evidence 403] will be disturbed only if it is arbitrary or irrational. United States v. Awadallah, 436 F.3d 125, 131 (2d Cir. 2006). Thus, even if erroneous, a court's decision to preclude evidence under Rule 403 warrants reversal only if it had a substantial and injurious effect or influence on the jury's verdict. United States v. Spoor, 904 F.3d 141, 153 (2d Cir. 2018) (internal quotation marks omitted). In particular, the appellants argue — as they did to the district court — that they should have been permitted to introduce evidence that commercial bribery was legal in their home countries because that fact, in their view, reveals that they 47 lacked the fraudulent intent (or bad faith) necessary to have committed honest services wire fraud. The district court considered this evidence and conducted the conscientious balancing called for by Awadallah. At the outset of its analysis, the court noted that whether the appellants had acted in bad faith turned not on whether they had acted with the intent to violate the laws of their home countries, but whether they had understood that their accepting bribes violated their duties to FIFA and CONMEBOL under the organizations' codes of ethics. Thus, evidence that commercial bribery was permitted under the laws of Brazil or Paraguay would be relevant to the question of the appellants' intent only if the jury could infer that: (1) the laws of the appellants' home countries permitted commercial bribery and the appellants knew or believed that to be so; and (2) the appellants believed that their duties to FIFA and [CONMEBOL] were identical to their obligations under th[ose] foreign law[s]. United States v. Webb et al., No.15-cr00252 (E.D.N.Y. Dec. 12, 2017), Mem. & Order Regarding Motion in Limine, ECF No. 853 at 24, Special App. at 57. Because the appellants had not articulated any reason to believe, let alone proffered any evidence, that they construed their duties to FIFA or [CONMEBOL] based on their understanding of their own countries' 48 criminal laws, the court determined that the second necessary inference was so attenuated that it border[ed] on speculation and thus that the evidence of foreign law proffered by the appellants carried extremely low probative value. Id. at 25, Special App. at 58. The district court concluded, moreover, that introduction of the foreign law evidence by the defendants presented an obvious risk of jury nullification in light of the substantial risk that the jury would improperly acquit [the appellants] if it believed that commercial bribery did not violate the laws of [their] home countries. Id. In other words, allowing the jury to focus on the legality of the appellants' conduct in Brazil or Paraguay would risk the jury's ignoring the question it needed to answer to determine their guilt or innocence: whether their accepting bribes had violated FIFA and CONMEBOL's codes of ethics, and thus had deprived those organizations of their honest services in violation of U.S. law. In sum, the district court decided, the risk of prejudice and juror confusion substantially outweigh[ed] any probative value there may be to allowing the appellants to introduce this foreign law evidence. Id. at 26, Special App. at 59. The district court's conclusion in this regard was hardly arbitrary or irrational. Awadallah, 436 F.3d at 131. Indeed, particularly in light of the at- 49 best-tangential nature of the relationship between the law of commercial bribery in Brazil and Paraguay and the U.S. law of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for the alleged violation of which the appellants were on trial, we do not think that the district court erred. The appellants offer two other arguments that this conclusion was arbitrary or irrational. First, they attempt to draw a parallel between their proffered foreign law evidence and the testimony of Stephanie Maennl, a government witness and FIFA lawyer whom the district court allowed to testify about FIFA's code of ethics. Marin Br. at 14–16. They argue that the relevance of Maennl's testimony, like the relevance of their foreign law evidence, required the jury to make a series of unwarranted inferential leaps. Not so: Maennl's testimony required the jury to draw only a single – and indeed modest –inference, that the appellants were aware of their obligations under the code of ethics she was describing, instead of the two inferences that were required to make the appellants' evidence probative. The appellants point to United States v. Brandt, 196 F.2d 653 (2d Cir. 1952), for the proposition that in a prosecution for wire fraud, since [good faith, or the lack thereof] may be only inferentially proven, . . . no events or actions which bear even remotely on its probability should be withdrawn from the jury unless the 50 tangential and confusing elements interjected by such evidence clearly outweigh any relevancy it might have. Id. at 657. That instruction, however, calls for precisely the analysis that the district court performed here: As the court in substance concluded, whatever minor probative value the appellants' foreign law evidence may have had, it was substantially outweigh[ed] by the risk that its introduction would cause the jury to be confused or inclined to vote not guilty simply because the appellants' conduct was not illegal in their home countries. United States v. Webb et al., No. 15-cr-00252 (E.D.N.Y. Dec. 12, 2017), Mem. & Order Regarding Motion in Limine, ECF No. 853 at 26, Special App. at 59. For their second argument, Marin Br. at 26–29, the appellants attack what the district court described as a caveat to its ruling. Id. The court acknowledged that its justification for excluding the foreign-law evidence — i.e., that it would require the jury to make two significant inferential steps — did not justify preventing the appellants from testifying that they themselves relied on [their] belief or understanding of [their] own country's laws to determine [their] obligations to FIFA or [CONMEBOL]. Id. That testimony, the court concluded, would bridge the gap between the [appellants'] belief[s] about foreign law . . . and [their] belief[s] about [their] duties to FIFA or [CONMEBOL] and thus would not 51 suffer from the same infirmity of attenuation . . . that render[ed] the other proffered evidence . . . inadmissible. Id. at 26–27, Special App. at 59–60. The appellants insist that this ruling forced them to choose, without good reason, between [their] Fifth Amendment right not to testify and [their] Sixth Amendment right to present a complete defense. Napout Br. at 56. The criminal process, however, is replete with situations requiring the making of difficult judgments as to which course to follow. Corbitt v. New Jersey, 439 U.S. 212, 218 n.8 (1978) (internal quotation marks omitted). Therefore, even when a defendant has a right . . . of constitutional dimension . . . to follow whichever course he chooses, the Constitution does not by that token always forbid requiring him to choose. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). Under these circumstances, because the foreign law evidence was probative only as it pertained to the appellants' understanding of their obligations to FIFA and CONMEBOL, and because only the appellants themselves could testify as to that understanding, the district court's ruling, although it forced the appellants to make a potentially difficult choice, did not run afoul of the Constitution.