The opinion starts off with a good summary of the issues presented (footnote omitted, but it is not Shakespeare):
"The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internally." According to the government's cooperating witnesses, the appellants—Earnest Gibson, III (Gibson III) and his son, Earnest Gibson, IV (Gibson IV)—participated in three: one to defraud Medicare, another to pay unlawful kickbacks, and a third to launder money. A jury convicted the Gibsons for each, plus several substantive kickback counts. On appeal, the Gibsons advance sufficiency challenges and assert that the health care fraud and money laundering conspiracies merged. For his part, Gibson III argues that the district court infringed his constitutional rights by limiting one of his cross-examinations and by admitting a co-conspirator's confession, in violation of the Bruton doctrine. He also faults the trial court for giving the jury "deliberate ignorance" instructions on charges requiring specific intent. In turn, Gibson IV posits that the district court imposed too much restitution. Both appellants also invoke the cumulative error doctrine, claiming that the trial court's alleged mistakes infected the verdict. We find no reversible error and thus affirm.The Bruton Holding:
The Bruton holding is complete, so I just cut and paste:
The Bruton doctrine addresses the thorny Sixth Amendment problem where one defendant confesses out of court and incriminates a co-defendant without testifying at their joint trial. In its landmark opinion, the Bruton Court reversed a defendant's postal robbery conviction, see 18 U.S.C. § 2114, on Confrontation Clause grounds where his non-testifying co-defendant had made "powerfully incriminating" statements against the defendant in a pretrial confession, 391 U.S. at 135-36. At trial, a postal inspector testified that the declarant twice confessed—once to say that both the declarant and the defendant committed the robbery, and again to admit to having an "an accomplice he would not name[.]" Id. at 124. Though the trial judge instructed the jury to consider the confessions against only the declarant, the Supreme Court reversed the conviction because there was a "substantial risk that the jury, despite instructions to the contrary, looked to the incriminating extrajudicial statements in determining petitioner's guilt[.]" Id. at 126.
