Tax Lawyer's Blog

I just read Snipes’s petiton for cert and discovered that his lawyers’ arguments are wackier than I had first thought.

Before his criminal trial Wesley Snipes claimed that venue was not proper in the Middle District of Florida, Ocala Division. The Court then allowed the venue issue to be presented to the jury. The jury found, by a preponderance of the evidence, that venue was indeed proper there.

Snipes then appealed his conviction on this and other grounds to the Eleventh Circuit and lost.

His attorneys have now petitioned the Supreme Court.

Here is the gist of Snipes’s argument as set forth in his petition for certiorari:

Faced with petitioner’s substantial claim that venue was improperly laid, as a matter of fact, for the counts charging him with failure to file income tax returns, the courts below  ruled that the jury in the contested locale itself must decide the issue rather than allowing a pretrial hearing to determine venue.

Relying on a jury drawn  from a judicial district that petitioner challenged as an improper vicinage to itself determine if it embodied the important constitutional protections of the Constitution’s venue provisions was inherently self-defeating.

Certiorari should be granted to consider this fundamental constitutional issue. If petitioner was entitled not to be tried in the Middle District of Florida for willful failure to file income tax returns, because when those omissions allegedly occurred, he did not have his permanent residence there – the circumstance that legally determines venue for this offense – then a jury in that District could not constitutionally be the appropriate body to decide whether venue was properly laid.  

Snipes’s lawyers are suggesting – apparently with straight faces – that in order to avoid being tried for an alleged crime all a Defendant need do is repeatedly raise the issue of improper venue.

This, of course, is insanity, and like the previous arguments conjured by Snipes’s dream team, it is doomed from the start.

Think about it: If a Defendant could disqualify a jury from deciding the venue issue merely by raising the venue issue, he could effectively prevent the venue issue from ever being decided by raising it in every jurisdiction.

If the venue issue can’t be decided, a trial can’t be held and the Defendant must eventually be set free for lack of a speedy trial.

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