United States v. Marinello
| Decision Date | 15 February 2017 |
| Docket Number | 15-2224 |
| Citation | 855 F.3d 455 (Mem) |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Carlo J. MARINELLO, II, Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
Joseph M. LaTona, Buffalo, NY, for Defendant-Appellant.
Russell T. Ippolito, Jr., Assistant United States Attorney, Buffalo, NY, for James P. Kennedy, Jr., Acting United States Attorney for the Western District of New York,1 Appellee.
Present: Robert A. Katzmann, Chief Judge, Dennis Jacobs, José A. Cabranes, Rosemary S. Pooler, Reena Raggi, Peter W. Hall, Debra Ann Livingston, Denny Chin, Raymond J. Lohier, Jr., Susan L. Carney, Christopher F. Droney, Circuit Judges.
Following disposition of this appeal, an active judge of the Court requested a poll on whether to rehear the case en banc . A poll having been conducted and there being no majority favoring en banc review, rehearing en banc is hereby DENIED .
Dennis Jacobs, Circuit Judge , joined by José A. Cabranes, Circuit Judge , dissents by opinion from the denial of rehearing en banc .
DENNIS JACOBS, Circuit Judge, joined by JOSÉ A. CABRANES, Circuit Judge, dissenting from the denial of rehearing in banc:
I respectfully dissent from the denial of rehearing in banc. The panel weighed in on the wrong side of a circuit split, affirmed a criminal conviction based on the most vague of residual clauses, and in so doing has cleared a garden path for prosecutorial abuse.
Marinello was convicted at trial on nine counts. Eight of them (for willful failure to file tax returns) raise no issue. The single problematic count is for violating the "omnibus clause" of the criminal portion of the Internal Revenue Code, which makes it a felony to "in any other way corruptly ... obstruct[ ] or impede[ ], or endeavor[ ] to obstruct or impede, the due administration of this title." 26 U.S.C. § 7212(a). Yes : "this title" is the entire corpus of the Internal Revenue Code—a slow read in 27 volumes of the United States Code Annotated.
The government charged that Marinello violated the omnibus clause in eight different ways. And the district court instructed the jury that it was enough for conviction that Marinello violated the statute in any single one of those several ways—and that the jurors did not need to agree among themselves as to which.
Among the acts listed in the jury charge as violating the omnibus clause are:
839 F.3d at 213 (internal brackets omitted). If this is the law, nobody is safe: the jury charge allowed individual jurors to convict on the grounds, variously, that Marinello did not keep adequate records; that, having kept them, he destroyed them; or that, having kept them and preserved them from destruction, he failed to give them to his accountant.
After conviction on all counts, Marinello moved for a new trial on the ground, inter alia, that the omnibus clause applied only to knowing obstruction of an ongoing IRS investigation, not to every possible impediment to the administration of any of the uncountable provisions of the Internal Revenue Code; and that he therefore should have been acquitted because there was no evidence that he was aware of an IRS investigation.
The district court rejected the argument and the panel affirmed, holding: "under section 7212(a), 'the due administration of this title' is not limited to a pending IRS investigation or proceeding of which the defendant had knowledge." 839 F.3d at 223. Accordingly, the law in the Second Circuit today is that it is a felony to "corruptly" take (or try to take) any of the actions listed above—or to take or try to take any other action that impedes the "due administration" of the Internal Revenue Code.
The Sixth Circuit, alert to the sweep of criminalizable conduct, held that the omnibus clause was limited to cases in which the defendant knew of a pending IRS action. United States v. Kassouf , 144 F.3d 952 (6th Cir. 1998) ; United States v. Miner , 774 F.3d 336, 342–45 (6th Cir. 2014). The Sixth Circuit's view is now distinctly in the minority, and the panel's opinion here signs on to the emerging consensus of error in the circuit courts.
Increasingly, the Supreme Court casts a cold eye on broad residual criminal statutes (particularly omnibus clauses like the one here), and has saved such statutes by construing the statutory text to cabin them.
In United States v. Aguilar , the Court considered a similarly worded statute concerning grand juror intimidation: the residual clause imposed criminal liability for one who "corruptly ... endeavors to influence, obstruct, or impede, the due administration of justice." 515 U.S. 593, 599–600, 115 S.Ct. 2357, 132 L.Ed.2d 520 (1995) ( 18 U.S.C. § 1503 ). To curb the impermissible breadth of the wording, the Court (a) implicitly interpreted "the due administration of justice" to require a court or grand jury proceeding (and thus excluded "an investigation independent of the court's or grand jury's authority"), and (b) explicitly required a "nexus" with a grand jury or judicial proceeding to support criminal liability.
Similar alarm about fair warning and overbreadth animates Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States , which recognized and generously construed a knowledge requirement to limit the scope of a statute that criminalized "corruptly persuad[ing]" someone to destroy documents. 544 U.S. 696, 125 S.Ct. 2129, 161 L.Ed.2d 1008 (2005) ( 18 U.S.C. § 1512 ). For much the same reason, the Supreme Court sharply curtailed so-called honest-services fraud in Skilling v. United States , 561 U.S. 358, 130 S.Ct. 2896, 177 L.Ed.2d 619 (2010). Further, in Yates v. United States , the government used a provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act criminalizing destruction of evidence to prosecute a poaching fisherman who threw fish overboard; the plurality invoked the rule of lenity to reverse on the ground that, under the statute, a fish was not a "tangible object." ––– U.S. ––––, 135 S.Ct. 1074, 1088, 191 L.Ed.2d 64 (2015) ( 18 U.S.C. § 1519 ). And in Johnson v. United States , the Court held that the "residual clause" of the Armed Career Criminal Act was so vague that it failed to provide the constitutionally required fair notice of what conduct it actually punished. ––– U.S. ––––, 135 S.Ct. 2551, 192 L.Ed.2d 569 (2015) ( 18 U.S.C. § 924(e) ). Most recently, in McDonnell v. United States , the Court rejected an expansive view of what qualifies as an "official act" in public corruption cases. ––– U.S. ––––, 136 S.Ct. 2355, 195 L.Ed.2d 639 (2016).
The panel opinion in Marinello affords the sort of capacious, unbounded, and oppressive opportunity for prosecutorial abuse that the Supreme Court has repeatedly curtailed.
The actus reus for this crime is the failure to keep sufficient books and records. The panel opinion likely took comfort in the mens rea requirement that the act or acts be done "corruptly." Any such comfort is surely an illusion, for two reasons. First, the risk of wrongful conviction, even with a mens rea requirement, is real: the line between aggressive tax avoidance and "corrupt" obstruction can be hard to discern, especially when no IRS investigation is active. Second, alleging a corrupt motive is no burden at all. Prosecutorial power is not just the power to convict those we are sure have guilty minds; it is also the power to destroy people. How easy it is under the panel's opinion for an overzealous or partisan prosecutor to investigate, to threaten, to force into pleading, or perhaps (with luck) to convict anybody .
The saving requirement that the Sixth Circuit added is that there must have been a pending IRS action of which the defendant was aware. That measure goes a good way toward setting some bounds. It construes the statute as a specialized tool for active IRS investigations, rather than a prosecutor's hammer that can be brought down upon any citizen.
And what is lost in confining this statute to interference with ongoing proceedings? Failure to pay taxes is already a crime, as is tax evasion. See 26 U.S.C. § 7201 -7207 ; 18 U.S.C. § 371. Marinello himself, who is certainly culpable for his tax evasion, was in fact convicted of eight such felonies aside from the single count of violating the omnibus clause. Indiscriminate application of this omnibus clause serves only to snag citizens who cannot be caught in the fine-drawn net of specified offenses, or to pile on offenses when a real tax cheat is convicted.
The panel opinion does not consider the risk of prosecutorial abuse at all, and dismisses overbreadth and vagueness in a single paragraph—and that paragraph merely cites other decisions. 839 F.3d at 221–22. Instead, the panel opinion spends pages positing differences between the phrases "due administration of justice" and "due administration of this title," and looking to statutory context and legislative history in an attempt to distinguish the Supreme Court's interpretation of a nearly identical statute in Aguilar.
The attempt fails. Aguilar looked to the conduct specified in the rest of the statute in construing the omnibus clause of 18 U.S.C. § 1503(a), and the panel opinion seeks to distinguish the omnibus clause here (§ 7212(a) ) on that basis. But reading § 7212(a) in context subverts rather than supports the panel's broad interpretation: a contextual reading demonstrates that § 7212(a) is about impediments to the work of particular officers and employees of the IRS, rather than to the work of the IRS in the abstract or in whole. The relevant text of § 7212(a) is as follows, with the omnibus clause italicized:
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Marinello v. United States
...2010) ; alteration in original). The full Court of Appeals rejected Marinello's petition for rehearing, two judges dissenting. 855 F.3d 455 (C.A.2 2017).Marinello then petitioned for certiorari, asking us to decide whether the Omnibus Clause requires the Government to prove the defendant wa......
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