Court Opinion

ID: 9499733
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:56:27.510603+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:41.842407
License: Public Domain

PAUL KELLY, JR., Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in the court’s opinion except insofar as it affirms the conviction on Count V by means of a harmless error review. I would reverse and remand for a new trial on all counts.
To determine whether a defendant’s acts, which deprived another “of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States” in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 242, constituted aggravated sexual abuse, it is necessary to reference 18 U.S.C. § 2241. Section 2241 criminalizes aggravated sexual abuse in certain instances giving rise to federal criminal jurisdiction. The fear component of an aggravated sexual abuse conviction under § 2241(a)(2) requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant caused another person to engage in a sexual act “by threatening or placing that other person in fear that any person will be subjected to death, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping.” See 18 U.S.C. § 2241(a)(2). In this case, the district court, seizing upon the Fifth Circuit’s language in United States v. Lucas, 157 F.3d 998, 1002-03 (5th Cir.1998), erroneously instructed the jury that “[t]he requirement of fear [under § 2241(a)(2) ] may be satisfied when the defendant’s actions implicitly place the victim in fear of some bodily harm.” See Op. at 1301. In so doing, the district court essentially instructed the jury that it could find Mr. Holly guilty of depriving his victims of their federal rights by means of aggravated sexual abuse under 18 U.S.C. § 242 so long as it found that he had committed non-aggravated sexual abuse under 18 U.S.C. § 2242(1), a statute which only requires a defendant to have caused “another person to engage in a sexual act by threatening or placing that other person in fear.... ” See id. at 1304.
The court views this as “merely an instructional error,” and therefore applies Nede-fs harmless error test. See id. at 1305, 1307. But the error was not merely instructional; rather, the district court instructed the jury it could convict Mr. Holly on a ground that was legally insufficient. In other words, this is not a simple case of mis-description or omission of an element of the offense. Instead, the jury was told it could convict Mr. Holly under § 242 so long as it found him guilty under § 2242(1). One’s guilt under § 2242(1), however, is a legally insufficient basis on which to hang an aggravated sexual abuse *1312conviction under § 242. What is required is a violation of § 2241.
The circumstances in this case call to mind the holdings of Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298, 77 S.Ct. 1064, 1 L.Ed.2d 1356 (1957), overruled in part on other grounds by Burks v. United States, 437 U.S. 1, 98 S.Ct. 2141, 57 L.Ed.2d 1 (1978), and Griffin v. United States, 502 U.S. 46, 112 S.Ct. 466, 116 L.Ed.2d 371 (1991). Yates teaches that a general verdict must be set aside where “the verdict is supportable on one ground [ (here, the force component of § 2241(a)(1)) ], but not on another [ (here, the fear component of § 2242) ], and it is impossible to tell which ground the jury selected.” 354 U.S. at 312, 77 S.Ct. 1064; see also United States v. Miller, 84 F.3d 1244, 1257 (10th Cir.1996), overruled in part on other grounds by United States v. Holland, 116 F.3d 1353, 1359 n. 4 (10th Cir.1997) (“Because the instruction defining one of the two alternative grounds for conviction was legally erroneous, we must reverse the conviction unless we can determine with absolute certainty that the jury based its verdict on the ground on which it was correctly instructed.”). The Supreme Court, in Griffin, clarified that the rule in Yates only applies in the case of legal error, which it defined as “a mistake about the law.” 502 U.S. at 59, 112 S.Ct. 466. The Court explained that legal error must result in the setting aside of a general verdict because:
When ... 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.

The error in this case falls within the legal error category with which jurors are particularly ill suited to deal' — after all, there is no reason to believe that the jurors’ “own intelligence and expertise” would have led them to conclude that placing another in fear of “some bodily injury” was legally insufficient and that placing another in fear of “death, serious bodily injury, or kidnapping” is what the statute actually requires. And because we cannot be sure that the jury’s verdict relied solely on the properly instructed force component, I would simply set aside the verdict as to all counts, including Count V, without conducting harmless error review.
Even if harmless error review applies to this type of instructional error, we should not undertake it. The burden of showing that an error is harmless lies with the government, but the government did not argue harmlessness and we ought not raise it sua sponte without the benefit of briefing. Given the constitutional implications of Neder — it essentially allows us to grant judgment as a matter of law in a criminal case in tension with the Sixth Amendment jury trial right — we should be cautious in deeming an error harmless on a record that is less than clear and without the benefit of the adversarial process. In recognition of the difficulty of conducting harmless error review sua sponte, we have previously cabined our discretion to do so with the following three factors: “(1) the length and complexity of the record; (2) whether the harmlessness of the errors is certain or debatable; and (3) whether a reversal would result in protracted, costly, and futile proceedings in the district court.” United States v. Samaniego, 187 F.3d 1222, 1224 (10th Cir.1999).
*1313The first factor undoubtedly weighs against such a review in the instant case— the trial transcript alone spans 700 pages, the jury trial lasted five days, a total of 32 witnesses were called, and each of the fifteen counts against Mr. Holly required separate proof. See Op. at 1308. Under the second factor, the evidence as to fear of serious bodily injury, death, or kidnapping is debatable as to Count V. To be sure, the evidence could give rise to a permissible inference that Mr. Holly threatened Ms. Helmert with serious bodily injury, death, or kidnapping. I do not think, however, that the jury was required to, or necessarily did, find that such a threat occurred. Nor can I say that the fear component of Count V was uncontro-verted. Mr. Holly’s primary defense at trial was that the incident did not occur; given that defense, it is not surprising that the requisite degree of fear was not fully developed, but that does not mean it is uncontroverted. In fact, implicit in Mr. Holly’s defense that the incident did not occur is the assertion that a threat serious enough to satisfy § 2241(a)(2) also did not occur.
In sum, I would reverse on all counts and remand for a new trial.