Certainty of the Law's Command and Willfulness (9/10/09)

In my last blog here, I concluded as follows:

In this proposed instruction, the court pre-empts the issue of uncertainty in the law. Once the court finds the uncertainty in the law, then, as in James, any conviction based on the defendant’s intent to violate the law is irrelevant. (I will discuss this aspect of James in my next blog.)

The James point is that, if the law is uncertain in some objective sense, the defendant can have the blackest, darkest, most evil specific subject intent to violate the law, and that will be irrelevant. Anglo-American jurisprudence simply does not permit convictions for evil intent alone. The following is from my recent article (John A. Townsend, Is Making the IRS's Job Harder Enough?, 9 Hous. & Bus. Tax L.J. 260, 263-4 (2009), here):

In its third meaning - i.e., in the Cheek meaning applicable to substantive tax crimes generally [that the defendant know the law and intend to violate it] - the requirement of willfulness has both objective and subjective components. 47 Objectively, as a matter of law, the law's command must be knowable - the law's command is sufficiently certain that it is capable of being known by a citizen. 48 Subjectively, the defendant must have actually known the rule and have intended to violate it. 49

The objective component invokes the court's function to determine whether the law is sufficiently certain that it sets an appropriate standard to guide and judge conduct where the law requires that the defendant know that he or she is violating the law. If it does not, then even if the defendant clearly intended to violate some law that he mistakenly thought was certain, he cannot be tried for it. 50

n47. See supra note 46 and accompanying text.
n48. See, e.g., United States v. Pirro, 212 F.3d 86, 91 (2000) ("Because only willful conduct is criminal under § 7206 and because willfulness requires a voluntary intentional violation of a known duty, the duty involved must be knowable.") (internal quotations omitted); see also James v. United States, 366 U.S. 213, 224, 82 S. Ct. 1052, 1058 (1961) [here] (describing what a "knowable" legal duty is); United States v. Critzer, 498 F.2d 1160, 1162-63 (4th Cir. 1974); Garber v. United States, 607 F.2d 92, 97-98 (5th Cir. 1979) (en banc); United States v. Dahlstrom, 713 F.2d 1423, 1428 (9th Cir. 1983), cert. denied, 466 U.S. 980 (1984); United States v. Mallas, 762 F.2d 361, 363 (4th Cir. 1985); United States v. Harris, 942 F.2d 1125, 1131 (7th Cir. 1991). Uncertainty of the law's requirements, often the by-product of tax law complexity and ambiguity, can defeat willfulness as a matter of law. See, e.g., Harris, 942 F.2d at 1131. The civil penalty regime of the tax law includes concepts for analysis in dealing with uncertainty in the law. The tax world deals daily with concepts such as frivolous, non-frivolous but not reasonable, reasonable basis, substantial authority, more likely than not, should, will or what have you. See infra note 75. By analogy to the willfulness requirement of the criminal tax laws, only the frivolous position would seem to support an environment where, as a matter of law, the taxpayer or the practitioner could be willful. This knowability standard is closely related to the rule of lenity, discussed below. See infra Part VII.
n49. See Cheek, 498 U.S. at 201; Bryan, 524 U.S. at 193-94.
n50. This point is established by the majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions in James v. United States, 366 U.S. 213, 221-22, 224-25, 246 (1961), a tax evasion case. After trial, the jury found the defendant guilty, which necessarily meant that the jury found he intended to violate the tax law. Id. The Supreme Court said that the law was sufficiently uncertain that a defendant could not be held to the standard even if he may have intended to violate the law. Id.