Court Opinion

ID: 9498570
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:20:55.265121+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:58:54.492808
License: Public Domain

JOSÉ A. CABRANES, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I would affirm the judgment of the District Court in its entirety. I concur with the majority’s reasoning in relation to counts one, four, five and ERISA’s anti-alienation provision. I dissent, however, from the vacatur of the judgment of conviction with respect to counts two and three — namely, the counts concerning defendant’s travel to Honduras (the “Honduras counts”).
The baleful consequences of the majority’s misapplication of the corroboration rule here seem clear enough. The suggestion of the majority’s opinion is that when prosecuting intent-based crimes, the government will be precluded from depending on a defendant’s reliable statements concerning his intent and instead must prove that intent with evidence of specific acts, such as “the testimony of hotel managers whom [the defendant] wrote objected when *418they found he had brought children to his hotel room,” ante, at 410. By requiring such further corroboration, the majority unnecessarily risks adding complication to the already-difficult task of prosecuting intent-based crimes. I therefore dissent from a decision that is in no way compelled by the corroboration rule.
The Honduras counts, of which defendant was convicted, charged him respectively with traveling outside the United States for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts with children under the age of eighteen, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2423(b), and traveling across state lines for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts with children under the age of twelve, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2241(c). Each of these crimes involves two elements that must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt: first, that defendant went to Honduras, and second, that he did so for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts with children under the relevant age. By the explicit terms of the statutes, the government was not required to prove that defendant engaged in particular sexual acts with children in Honduras, or indeed, in any specific acts in Honduras.
Our most recent pronouncement on the corroboration rule, in United States v. Bryce, 208 F.3d 346 (2000), emphasized that “the modern corroboration rule requires only that there be ‘substantial independent evidence which would tend to establish the trustworthiness of the statement.’ ” Id. at 354 (quoting Opper v. United States, 348 U.S. 84, 93, 75 S.Ct. 158, 99 L.Ed. 101 (1954)). Moreover, some statements do not require corroboration — we explained that if “the defendant’s statements, given their nature and context, can support a finding of guilt beyond a -reasonable doubt, no further evidence is needed.” Id. at 355 (emphasis added). The majority opinion concludes that defendant’s journal is neither self-corroborating nor “sufficiently corroborated ‘to justify a jury inference of [its] truth.’ ” Ante, at 410 (quoting Opper, 348 U.S. at 93, 75 S.Ct. 158).
As a matter of common sense, the journal, filled as it is with copious details about defendant’s attempts to engage in sexual activity with prepubescent male street children, is a reliable guide to the purpose of his trip to Honduras. The journal — which was maintained contemporaneously, distributed to like-minded friends and filled with descriptions of behavior consistent with defendant’s other known activities— demonstrates defendant’s intent “so reliably that, without the need for other supporting evidence,” it can support a finding of guilt. Bryce, 208 F.3d at 355.1 In any event, substantial independent evidence introduced at trial — including defendant’s employment records, passport, bank records, statements to his friend Decker regarding the Honduras trip, and travel to Mexico for similarly depraved purposes-— makes clear that the “narrative of child molestation” contained in the journal could not just “as easily be a record of fantasies as of events that actually transpired,” ante, at 409. The substantial independent evidence “supports the essential facts admitted sufficiently to justify a jury inference of their truth.” Opper, 348 U.S. at 93, 75 S.Ct. 158.
*419It is worth underscoring that the Honduras counts do not involve charges of possession of an illicit substance, as in Bryce, or charges of any other per se illegal actions. Rather, the questions presented by the Honduras counts are whether defendant traveled to Honduras and did so for the purpose of engaging in sexual acts with children. In light of the substantial independent evidence in the record, defendant’s detailed contemporary statements were certainly a reliable basis to conclude that he went to Honduras for that unlawful purpose. Accordingly, when the evidence is viewed in its totality with all inferences drawn in the government’s favor, see Jackson v. Virginia, 443 U.S. 307, 319, 99 S.Ct. 2781, 61 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979), a reasonable trier of fact could, as the jury did here, return a guilty verdict on the Honduras counts.

. To take but one of defendant’s many comments that elucidate the purpose of his trip, his diary entry for January 2, 1999, the second day of the trip, states:
This is the point at which in 1993 Oscar-the-Street-Boy encountered me in the street near the Hotel El Nilo and asked for something to eat, opening the way to the fulfilling week that followed that my American buddy, Zorro, and I spent with Oscar and five other uncivilized, but curiously cuddlesome Hondurans. No such luck yet this time.