United States v. Jimmy D. Morris, Franklin W. Briggs

How courts have described this case

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

• holding that it was error for the district court to refuse to give a general good faith jury instruction at all
• holding that a jury instruction compromised the appellants’ good-faith argument because it did not “make clear that a good-faith belief by the appellants that they were complying with the tax laws, whether or not objectively reasonable, negates the specific intent element”
• holding that mandatory consecutive sentences imposed by statute do not violate the Eighth Amendment and that, 21 “as long as the sentence imposed on a defendant does not exceed statutory limits, this court will not overturn it on Eighth Amendment grounds”
• noting that good-faith belief that defendant complied with tax laws is a complete defense to willfully filing a false tax return
• construing 26 U.S.C. § 7206(1), which requires proof of specific intent or willfulness, and recognizing good faith to be a viable defense to such a charged crime
• “The government ... must prove that each of the defendants knew that the law placed a duty on him and that he voluntarily and intentionally violated that duty.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).