Ambiguous Jury Instruction

Listen to this article

Criminal

7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Officials: EASTERBROOK, KANNE, and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

Ambiguous Jury Instruction

No. 11-3853 USA v. Rod Blagojevich

Where dissemination of ambiguous jury instruction that treated multiple actions, considered legally different, as one was grounds for vacated judgment.

“But a problem in the way the instructions told the jury to consider the evidence requires us to vacate the convictions on counts that concern Blagojevich’s proposal to appoint Valerie Jarrett to the Senate in exchange for an appointment to the Cabinet. A jury could have found that Blagojevich asked the President-elect for a private-sector job, or for funds that he could control, but the instructions permitted the jury to convict even if it found that his only request of Sen. Obama was for a position in the Cabinet. The instructions treated all proposals alike. We conclude, however, that they are legally different: a proposal to trade one public act for another, a form of logrolling, is fundamentally unlike the swap of an official act for a private payment.”

Vacated in part, affirmed in part and remanded

Full Text

Attorney Derek A. Hawkins is the managing attorney at Hawkins Law Offices LLC, where he heads up the firm’s startup law practice. He specializes in business formation, corporate governance, intellectual property protection, private equity and venture capital funding and mergers & acquisitions. Check out the website at www.hawkins-lawoffices.com or contact them at 262-737-8825.