whether-the-promotional-money-laundering-provision-violates-due-process

QUESTIONS PRESENTED FOR REVIEW 1. Whether the promotional money laundering provision of Money Laundering Control Act of 1986, 18 U.S.C.A. § 1956 (a)(1)(A)Q), violates the due process guarantee against vague criminal laws. The vagueness of the phrase “with intent to promote the carrying on” of a specified unlawful activity frequently results in a merger problem whereby proving the underlying specified unlawful activity automatically proves the promotional money laundering charge. This is tantamount to double jeopardy. During the statute’s almost thirty-seven-year history courts have persistently failed to craft an interpretation of the statute’s language which avoids the merger problem. Courts’ repeated failure to craft a principled and objective standard to avoid merger “confirms its [the phrases’ ] hopeless indeterminacy” which denies defendants fair notice and invites arbitrary enforcement by judges and prosecutors. In the present case, the same acts which proved the specified unlawful activity automatically proved the money laundering offense merging the two offenses. Courts repeated failure to solve the merger problem means the provision is void for vagueness. IL. Whether the evidence was insufficient to convict Petitioner of money laundering. The government failed to prove that the Petitioner’s specific intent in agreeing to purchase heroin was “to promote the carrying on” of heroin distribution. Petitioner’s specific intent in conspiring to purchase heroin was to pay back the money he lost during a botched cocaine sale. While the transaction contemplated in the heroin conspiracy may have had the ‘effect’ of promoting the carrying on of the distribution of heroin, that was not Petitioner’s intent in entering into conspiracy. Strict adherence to the specific intent requirement in the statute is vital so that crimes that “Congress duly considered and appropriately punished elsewhere in the criminal code” do not increase a sentence for that crime. In the present case the money laundering counts increase Petitioner’s sentence by two points. Ill. Whether the district court committed plain error when it instructed the jury on the incorrect scienter requirement for conspiracy to commit money laundering, as well as failing to instruct the jury as to which drug conspiracy the prosecution alleged Petitioner intended to promote. IV. | Whether Fed. R. Crim. P. 12, as amended in 2014, precludes appellate review of a multiplicity claim raised for the first time on appeal, absent a showing of good cause. And whether Appellant’s conviction on Counts One and Two, both charging him under 21 U.S.C. § 846 with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute controlled substances, constitutes multiple punishment for the same offense in violation of the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. 2