Court Opinion

ID: 9481272
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:12:49.534856+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:48:11.167572
License: Public Domain

KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur in the judgment. I would reverse the continuing criminal enterprise conviction because an essential element of such a conviction may not have been met: that the jury unanimously agree as to the identity of five people whom Jerome organized, managed or supervised, within the meaning of the statute. There are two problems here.
First, as the government conceded at oral argument before us, some of the people named by the prosecutor during his closing argument to the jury—the suppliers of Jerome’s suppliers—could not have been organized, managed or supervised by Jerome under any reading of the statute. Yet the jurors may have counted some of these toward the five they concluded Jerome had organized. The jury instructions did not clarify that “suppliers of suppliers” could not meet the statutory definition; in fact, the instructions may have suggested the contrary. Instruction 46, given over the defendant’s objection, stated that “[t]he ordinary meaning of the word ‘organizer’ does not necessarily carry an implication that to be an ‘organizer’ one must exercise control over others.” CR 320, Instruction 46. Based on this instruction, the jurors may have concluded that Jerome “organized" the suppliers of his suppliers and thus may have counted one or more of the people improperly named by the prosecutor in his closing argument.
Second, the jury was not given a specific unanimity instruction, i.e., an instruction that the jurors must unanimously agree as to the identity of each of the five people Jerome organized, managed or supervised.1 On the facts of this case, this was plain error. See United States v. Gilley, 836 F.2d 1206, 1211-13 (9th Cir.1988); United States v. Payseno, 782 F.2d 832 (9th Cir.1986). A specific unanimity instruction must be given “when a ‘genuine possibility’ of juror confusion exists,” i.e., when it is possible that some jurors will convict on the basis of one set of facts while others will convict on the basis of another set of facts. Gilley, 836 F.2d at 1211, quoting United States v. Echeverry, 719 F.2d 974, 974 (9th Cir.1983); Payseno, 782 F.2d at 837. This is the case here. Some twenty people were named by the prosecutor during his closing argument as potential prospects for meeting the five-person requirement. RT 2594-97. We have no way of knowing whether different jurors counted different people; given the large cast of characters, the complex relations among them and the large volume of evidence presented to the jury during the lengthy trial, it is entirely possible the jury did just that.

. I cannot agree with the majority that the jury should have been instructed as to “who could not count towards Jerome’s conviction of a continuing criminal enterprise." Maj. at 173 (emphasis added). The appellant has never argued that the jury should have been so instructed. Moreover, such an instruction might well have been improper. The judge may not make the factual determinations that necessarily underlie a conclusion that somebody was not organized by the defendant, e.g., that the person did nothing more than supply drugs to the defendant’s supplier. The jury alone must determine what relationship and dealings each person had with the defendant.