Court Opinion

ID: 9843315
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-24 02:33:03.651977+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:16:38.206581
License: Public Domain

GRABER, Circuit Judge,
with whom PREGERSON, THOMAS, and PAEZ, Circuit Judges, join, dissenting:
Assuming the Jewell instruction to be proper, I agree with the majority that the standard by which to review a district court’s decision to give one is “abuse of discretion” in the light of the evidence presented at trial. But as a matter of statutory construction, I believe that the Jewell instruction is not proper because it misconstrues, and misleads the jury about, the mens rea required by 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1). Because the legal error of giving a Jewell instruction in this case was not harmless beyond a reasonable doubt, I respectfully dissent.
*931Under 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), it is a crime to “knowingly or intentionally ... manufacture, distribute, or dispense, or possess with intent to manufacture, distribute, or dispense, a controlled substance.” (Emphasis added.) The plain text of the statute does not make it a crime to have a high probability of awareness of possession — knowledge or intention is required.
The majority recognizes that willful blindness is a mens rea separate and distinct from knowledge. See Majority op. at 922-23 (“Actual knowledge, of course, is inconsistent with willful blindness.”); see also United States v. Jewell, 532 F.2d 697, 705-06 (9th Cir.1976) (en banc) (Kennedy, J., dissenting) (“The majority opinion justifies the conscious purpose jury instruction as an application of the wilful blindness doctrine recognized primarily by English authorities.... [T]he English authorities seem to consider wilful blindness a state of mind distinct from, but equally culpable as, ‘actual’ knowledge.” (emphasis added)). Similarly, if not even more obviously, willful blindness is at least one step removed from intention.
Instead of justifying its sleight-of-hand directly, the majority points' to the fact that Jewell has been on the books for 30 years and that Congress has not amended the statute in a way that repudiates Jeioell expressly. Majority op. at 918-19. I find this reasoning unpersuasive. “[Congressional inaction lacks persuasive significance because several equally tenable inferences may be drawn from such inaction....” United States v. Craft, 535 U.S. 274, 287, 122 S.Ct. 1414, 152 L.Ed.2d 437 (2002) (internal quotation marks omitted). “It is impossible to assert with any degree of assurance that congressional failure to act represents affirmative congressional approval of the [courts’] statutory interpretation.” Cent. Bank of Denver v. First Interstate Bank of Denver, 511 U.S. 164, 186, 114 S.Ct. 1439, 128 L.Ed.2d 119 (1994) (alteration in original) (internal quotation marks omitted); see also Jones v. Liberty Glass Co., 332 U.S. 524, 533-34, 68 S.Ct. 229, 92 L.Ed. 142 (1947) (rejecting the doctrine of legislative acquiescence as, at best, “an auxiliary tool for use in interpreting ambiguous statutory provisions”).
Whatever relevance congressional inaction holds in this case is outweighed by actual congressional action. Under 21 U.S.C. § 841(a)(1), a person is guilty of a crime only if the requisite act is performed “knowingly or intentionally.” By contrast, both before and after Jewell, Congress has defined several other crimes in which the mens rea involves a high probability of awareness — but it has done so in phrases dramatically different than the one here, which lists only knowledge and intent. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. §§ 175b(b)(l)(“knows or has reasonable cause to believe”), 175b(b)(2) (same), 792 (“knows, or has reasonable grounds to believe or suspect”), 842(h) (“knowing or having reasonable cause to believe”), 2332d(a) (“knowing or having reasonable cause to know”), 2339(a) (“knows, or has reasonable grounds to believe”), 2424(a) (“knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact”). Most importantly, Congress has done so in adjacent sections of the same statute, the Controlled Substances Act, 21 U.S.C. §§ 801-971, and even within the same section of the same statute. See 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(c)(2)(“know-ing, or having reasonable cause to believe”), 843(a)(6)(“knowing, intending, or having reasonable cause to believe”), 843(a)(7) (same). “It is axiomatic that when Congress uses different text in ‘adjacent’ statutes it intends that the different terms carry a different meaning.” White v. Lambert, 370 F.3d 1002, 1011(9th Cir.2004). Thus, “[i]f we do our job of reading the statute whole, we have to give effect to [its] plain command, even if doing that will *932reverse the longstanding practice under the statute and the rule.” Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26, 35, 118 S.Ct. 956, 140 L.Ed.2d 62 (1998) (citations omitted).
The majority recognizes that the Jewell instruction embodies a substantive decision that those who possess a controlled substance and “don’t know because they don’t want to know” are just as culpable as those who knowingly or intentionally possess a controlled substance. Majority op. at 918; see also Model Penal Code § 2.02 cmt. 9, at 248(“Whether such cases [of wilful blindness] should be viewed as instances of acting recklessly or knowingly presents a subtle but important question.”). But Congress never made this substantive decision about levels of culpability — the Jewell court did. By “elear[ing] away the underbrush that surrounds” the instruction, majority op. at 919, the majority chooses to reaffirm this judge-made substantive decision. In so doing, the majority directly contravenes the principle that “[i]t is the legislature, not the Court, which is to define a crime, and ordain its punishment.” United States v. Wiltberger, 18 U.S. (5 Wheat.) 76, 95, 5 L.Ed. 37 (1820). “ ‘The spirit of the doctrine which denies to the federal judiciary power to create crimes forthrightly admonishes that we should not enlarge the reach of enacted crimes by constituting them from anything less than the incriminating components contemplated by the words used in the statute.’ ” Jewell, 532 F.2d at 706 n. 7 (Kennedy, J., dissenting) (quoting Morissette v. United States, 342 U.S. 246, 263, 72 S.Ct. 240, 96 L.Ed. 288 (1952)). The majority creates a duty to investigate for drugs that appears nowhere in the text of the statute, transforming knowledge into a mens rea more closely akin to negligence or recklessness.
I agree with the Jewell court that “one ‘knows’ facts of which he is less than absolutely certain.” 532 F.2d at 700. That being so, the mens rea-reducing Jewell instruction not only is wrong, it also is unnecessary in the face of the kind of proof that a prosecutor is likely to produce. For example, if your husband comes home at 1:00 a.m. every Friday (after having left work at 5:00 p.m. the day before as usual), never reveals where he has been, won’t look you in the eye on Fridays, and puts Thursday’s shirts in the hamper bearing lipstick stains, your friends will agree that you “know” he is having an affair even if you refuse to seek confirmation. The role of a jury is to apply common sense to the facts of a given case. A sensible jury will be persuaded that a drug mule “knows” what she is carrying when confronted with evidence of how mules typically operate and how this mule acted — all without reference to a Jewell instruction.
Thus, I would overrule Jewell and interpret 21 U.S.C. § 841(a) to require exactly what its text requires — a knowing or intentional mens rea. If Congress wants to criminalize willful ignorance, it is free to amend the statute to say so and, in view of the several examples quoted above, it clearly knows how.
Because I believe that the district court’s giving of a Jewell instruction in this case was legal error,1 “ ‘the proper rule to be applied is that which requires a verdict to be set aside in cases where the verdict is supportable on one ground, but not on another, and it is impossible to tell which ground the jury selected.’” Griffin v. United States, 502 U.S. 46, 52, 112 S.Ct. *933466, 116 L.Ed.2d 371 (1991) (quoting Yates v. United States, 854 U.S. 298, 812, 77 S.Ct. 1064, 1 L.Ed.2d 1356 (1957)).2 As the majority acknowledges, it is not possible to tell whether the jury convicted Carmen Heredia based on actual knowledge. “[A] rational jury might have bought Here-dia’s basic claim that she didn’t know about the drugs in the trunk, yet disbelieved other aspects of her story,” thereby concluding that she acted with willful ignorance. Majority op. at 923. Accordingly, I cannot find that the error of giving a Jewell instruction was harmless, and I respectfully dissent.

. Heredia objected at trial to the giving of the Jewell instruction, RT 3/12/03, pp. 186-90, and her own set of proposed instructions ex-eluded it. Thus, we review under the usual principles and not just for plain error.

. In Griffin, the Supreme Court applied the Yates harmless error test to legal errors in instructing a jury and the Turner v. United States, 396 U.S. 398, 90 S.Ct. 642, 24 L.Ed.2d 610 (1970), harmless error test to instructional errors concerning the weight of the evidence. Griffin, 502 U.S. at 59-60, 112 S.Ct. 466. Under the Turner rule, " '[w]hen a jury returns a guilty verdict on an indictment charging several acts ..., the verdict stands if the evidence is sufficient with respect to any one of the acts charged.' ” Griffin, 502 U.S. at 56-57, 112 S.Ct. 466(quoting Turner, 396 U.S. at 420, 90 S.Ct. 642). The Court distinguished the two errors by reasoning that
[wjhen ... jurors have been left the option of relying upon a legally inadequate theory, there is no reason to think that their own intelligence and expertise will save them from that error. Quite the opposite is true, however, when they have been left the option of relying upon a factually inadequate theory, since jurors are well equipped to analyze the evidence.
Id. at 59, 112 S.Ct. 466.
Several of our sister circuits have held the giving of a Jewell instruction to be harmless error if sufficient evidence supports a finding of actual knowledge. See, e.g., United States v. Leahy, 445 F.3d 634, 654 n. 15 (3d Cir.2006); United States v. Hanzlicek, 187 F.3d 1228, 1235-36 (10th Cir.1999); United States v. Mari, 47 F.3d 782, 786-87 (6th Cir.1995); United States v. Adeniji, 31 F.3d 58, 63 (2d Cir.1994); United States v. Stone, 9 F.3d 934, 939-42 (11th Cir.1993). But that is because they presume the Jewett instruction to be a correct statement of the law and, thus, apply the Turner rule.