Court Opinion

ID: 9468322
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:12:00.333087+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:49.084860
License: Public Domain

ALBERT V. BRYAN, Senior Circuit Judge,
dissenting:
As the majority pithily puts it, the. sole point of reversal is the District Court’s refusal to grant this instruction to the jury:
It is a defense that defendant signed the forms in reliance on expert advice. The reliance defense, to be effective, must establish good faith reliance on an expert coupled with full disclosure to that expert.
I agree that the proferred instruction is a correct statement of law in the abstract. However, I cannot agree that its invocation here in haec verba was indispensable or even imperative to a fair trial. The reason is that its teaching was in fact fully and repeatedly given to the jury, in instructions well embracing and preserving appellant’s claim of reliance.
In ascribing deficiency to the District Judge’s charge as not embodying appellant’s right of “reliance,” the majority cite as precedent this court’s rejection of the instructions relating to the subject in United States v. Mitchell, 495 F.2d 285 (C.A.4 1977). But there the court’s layout to the jury of the defense differed significantly from the manner of submission adopted presently. In Mitchell only scattered and sparse references were made to the critical factors of defense. We concluded that “both from the separation [by other remarks] and their inherent ambiguity, . . . defendant did not receive the precise and specific charge to which he was entitled.1
However, the instructions as given instantly did not suffer from either of the infirmities stressed in Mitchell. Certainly, they did not lose force or coherence through separateness or ambiguity. The judge’s directives upon the question of defendant’s specific intent to defraud the Government were phrased with inescapable clarity. In speaking to the jury on the necessity of proof of appellant’s fraudulent intent, his words were not perfunctory. Rather, they were a thorough and emphatic insistence that appellant should not be convicted for anything he had done through misunderstanding or unknowingly.2 The jurors deliberated under a simple and readily digestible explanation of the law.
Incidentally, I am unable to grasp how the statements by the trial judge, made after granting the jury’s request for further instructions, can be said, as do the majority, to have confused the issue. A reading of the whole of it at once manifests that the court was again only impressing the issue upon the jury:
A representation that one’s family income for the preceding twelve months is forty-five hundred dollars when in fact the family income was far in excess of that amount is, as a matter of law, a material representation.... Now, that’s all I’m ruling, that such a representation if made knowingly, wilfully and intentionally is a material representation. It is for you to determine whether when the *239defendant made or caused to be made such a representation. First you have got to determine whether he did it. Secondly — or caused it to be done— secondly, you have got to determine the circumstances under which it was done. Did he knowingly and intentionally and wilfully make the statement with the intent to defraud or cause the statement to be made and filed with the Employment Security Commission, the South Carolina Employment Security Commission, with intent to defraud.
Record, vol. 2, at 356.
The charge of the District Court strikingly ensured his acquittal if appellant had acted through mistake. Simply said, he did not “tell the whole truth” when he last applied for the CETA employment. His criminal conduct was aptly summed by the District Judge in sentencing:
Well, you know, one of the things that impressed me in the trial was that there was evidence that you went to the CETA office sometime before you actually got this job and at that time you were interviewed and you told them what your family income was and they told you then that you were not eligible because of your family income for the CETA program. Then later you indicated you had gone back again to the same office and you tell them your family income is forty-five hundred dollars and you meet the guidelines and you get your job.
That is very strong evidence that you knowingly, willfully, and intentionally went in and misrepresented your family income, because you had been in and denied a CETA job in that same office by being told there that your family income was too high, and then later you go back and tell them it is forty-five hundred dollars, which was within the guidelines that you could get the job.
Transcript of sentencing proceedings at 19-20.
I would affirm the conviction.

. Id. at 288. In the other case cited in the majority opinion, Bursten v. United States, 395 F.2d 976 (C.A.5 1968), the trial judge refused the requested instruction because he had found that the expert was not qualified to advise the defendant; it was not because he believed that he had adequately presented the issue to the jury. See id. at 981-82.

. E. g.: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, the acts charged against the defendant in both of the counts of this indictment were allegedly done by the defendant wilfully and knowingly.... An act is done knowingly if done voluntarily and intentionally and not because of mistake or accident or any other innocent reason. The purpose of requiring that a defendant, proof that a defendant acted wilfully and knowingly is to insure that no defendant will be convicted for an act done by him because of mistake or accident or any other innocent reason. We do not want a person convicted for any innocent acts done by him. He has to act knowingly, intentionally and wilfully.” Record, vol. 2, at 326 (accent added).