United States v. Donald Ferrarini, Everett J. Vieira, A. Michael Kagan, Bruno Rumnigant, Howard Miller

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• concluding that the Sentencing Commission's \legal authority to adopt\ a guideline can come from both a Congressional directive or the Sentencing Commission's general statutory authority \to develop guidelines . . . that reflect the seriousness of the offense at issue\
• explaining that although the conscious avoidance instruction was erroneous, there was ample evidence of actual knowledge, and therefore the error was harmless
• questioning whether a premium finance company was similar to any of the enumerated instances of financial institutions, and finding that it was similar to a bank
• “Although this definition of ‘willful’ includes references to knowledge, it also clearly and conjunctively requires a finding of intentional purposefulness.”
• “A conscious avoidance instruction permits a jury to find that a defendant had culpable knowledge of a fact when the evidence shows that the defendant intentionally avoided confirming the fact.”
• “[A]n erroneously given conscious avoidance instruction constitutes harmless error if the jury was charged on actual knowledge and there was ‘overwhelming evidence’ to 4 16-4289-cr(L

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).