Justices Rule Action Isn't Necessary to Prove Conspiracy

New York Times/January 12, 2005
By Linda Greenhouse

Washington -- The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the government can obtain a conviction for a money-laundering conspiracy without the need to prove that any of the conspirators did anything concrete to carry out the scheme.

The unanimous decision resolved, in the government's favor, a dispute among the lower federal courts over the meaning of a 1992 amendment that added a conspiracy provision to the federal law against money laundering.

The amendment omitted the requirement, contained in many federal conspiracy laws, that the government prove an "overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy," beyond the act of conspiring. The question was whether, despite this omission, the provision should nonetheless be interpreted to include the requirement of an overt act.

The case was an appeal by two men who were members of the board of the Greater Ministries International Church, which raised more than $400 million from 1996 to 1999. Investors were told that they would double their money in short order if they provided the church with "gifts" that would be invested overseas in gold, diamonds and commodities, with profits going in part to charity.

"Most of these claims were false," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor observed dryly in recounting the facts of the case in her opinion for the court. She added, referring to the church by its initials, that the "investments indeed largely turned out to be 'gifts' to GMIC representatives." The two men, David Whitfield and Haywood E. Hall, received more than $1 million in commissions.

A federal grand jury in Tampa, Fla., indicted the two for a variety of offenses, including conspiring to launder money. At the trial, the judge explained the elements of that offense to the jury: "that two or more people came to a mutual understanding to try to accomplish a common and unlawful plan" and that the defendant "knowingly and willfully became a member of such conspiracy."

The judge refused a defense request to instruct the jury that the government had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that at least one of the co-conspirators committed an overt act that favored the conspiracy. Their conviction on the conspiracy charge was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, which observed that the Supreme Court had recently interpreted the similarly worded drug conspiracy statute and found that it did not require proof of an overt act.

In her opinion, Justice O'Connor observed that in the general federal conspiracy law and in 22 provisions outlawing specific types of conspiracies, Congress had included an overt-act requirement, "clearly demonstrating that it knows how to impose such a requirement when it wishes to do so." Among these are conspiracies to kill or kidnap the president and other government officials, to steal trade secrets and to produce "defective national defense material."

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers urged the justices to find an overt-act requirement in the money-laundering conspiracy statute. The group's brief said that the absence of such a requirement "would give federal prosecutors unbridled discretion to bring such prosecutions whenever and wherever they choose, implicating constitutional due process principles and concerns about a statute that was already very broad."

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist voted in the case, Whitfield v. United States, No. 03-1293, although he was not on the bench when it was argued on Nov. 30. The chief justice, who is being treated for thyroid cancer, has returned to work in his chambers, but he is not participating in the argument sessions. Although the justices have generally kept up their usual pace of work during his prolonged absence, it was somewhat surprising that the court issued just one decision on Tuesday, its first decision day since returning from a four-week recess.