The on again off again guilty plea of Phillip and Nancy Garrido for kidnapping and rape of Jaycee Dugard finally happened yesterday in Placerville, California.

Dugard was kidnapped outside her home while she was on the way to school in 1991 when she was 11 years old and held for eighteen years. When she was found she was living in a shack behind the Garrido’s Antioch residence with the two children who were fathered by Phillip Garrido.

Phillip Garrido plead to guilty to kidnapping and thirteen counts of sexual assault. He will be sentenced on June 2 to 431 years to life. Nancy Garrido plead to kidnapping and aiding her husband commit rape . She will be sentence to 36 years. She will be eligible for parole after 31 years in custody at the age of 81.

According to Nancy Garrido’s lawyer Stephen Tapson, it was Nancy Garrido’s desire to plead to save Dugard and her children from the pressure of having to testify that lead to the plea. One might question this because after all these years of being quiet, assisting in the kidnapping and allowing Dugard to be raped why does she care if Dugard has to testify. It certainly sounds self serving. But it is unlikely that the plea is lawyer motivated. Why would anyone agree to what is in effect two life sentences. When your only option is life you may as well throw the dice and go to trial. The only logical explanation is that the Garridos did not wanted the trial and were willing to accept life sentences,

The Supreme Court of Utah reversed the conviction of Warren Jeffs, the the leader and “prophet” of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. for aiding and abetting the rape of Elissa Wall for his role in the compelled marriage of the fourteen-year-old girl to her nineteen-year-old first cousin, Allen Steed.

Jeff’s father and predecessor as leader and “prophet” of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Rulon Jeffs arranged the marriage of Wall to her 19 year old cousin. Despite Wall’s clear reluctance to marry her cousin Warren Jeffs, Wall’s teacher and religious instructor pushed her into marrying him and performed the ceremony. When she asked him for the equivalent of a divorce he denied it.

To convict someone for aiding and abetting a rape it first must be shown that the rape occurred. Rape is unconsented sex. At trial the prosecution argued that Wall was raped under three different sections of Utah’s consent law. The jury was instructed:

An act of sexual intercourse is without
consent of a person under any, all, or a combination of the following circumstances:
1. The person expresses lack of consent through words or conduct; or
2. The person was 14 years of age or older, but younger than 18 years of age, and the actor was more than three years older than the person and enticed the person to submit or participate; or
3. The person was younger than 18 years of age and at the time of the offense the actor occupied a position of special trust in relation to the person.

The Court and the District Attorney, in the rush to convict Jeffs for the high publicity crime confused the instructions regarding aiding and abetting and the underlying crime of rape. For example, the District Attorney argued that Jeffs was more than three years older than Wall when the law requires that the rapist (allegedly Steed) be three years older than the victim. Again, the instruction talks about a special relationship between the rapist and the victim but the District Attorney argued that there must be a special relationship (teacher and religious leader) between Jeffs and Wall. Throughout the trial the District Attorney seem to confuse Wall’s lack of consent to the marriage with the required lack of consent to sex with Steed.

Furthermore, in order to convict Jeffs it was necessary to show that he intended that Steed rape Wall. Yet nowhere in the trial was there evidence that Jeffs told Steed to rape Wall. At the marriage he told the couple to “go forth and multiply and replenish the earth with good priesthood children.” Jeffs was tried on two counts. The first involved the first time the couple had sex when it appears as if Wall did not give consent. The second was after she asked for a divorce and Jeffs told her to obey her husband. But it is not clear that he intended that Steed have unconsented sex with Wall.

The Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial.

Aiding and abetting requires (1) an act contributing to the commission of the crime; and (2) the intent to aid in the commission of the crime. In United States v. Bronzino the Sixth Circuit, yesterday, found Vincenzo Bronzino guilty of aiding and abetting money laundering.

Bronzino paid an illegal betting debt to Peter Messina using 15,000 dollars worth of legally obtained betting chips. Messina was reluctant to take the chips. He was afraid that if he tried to cash them in he would have to give his name. Bronzino told him not to worry. That as long as he cashed less than 10,000 dollars of chips in at a time he would be okay. The law requires that anyone involved in a cash transaction of over ten thousand dollars provide their name and identity as well as the source of the money.

However the offense of structuring a money laundering transaction is accomplished by manipulating an event by using multiple transactions to avoid the ten thousand dollar limit. Bronzino did not deny that Messina committed money laundering when he used multiple transactions to convert the fifteen thousand dollars of gambling chips into cash. But he argued that by encouraging Messina to use multiple transactions he was not aiding and abetting the crime.

The Sixth Circuit found that Bronzino committed an act contributing to the commission of the crime with the intent to aid in the commission of the crime. Specifically he contributed to money laundering by “teaching” Messina how to perform multiple transactions in an attempt to avoid detection. As such he was a catalyst without which the crime would not have occurred.

Second, as to Bronzino’s intent, Bronzino argued that he did not have the intent to violate the money laundering laws. He merely wanted to encourage Messina to take the chips in payment of the debt. To be guilty of money laundering one must have the specific intent to violate the same law as the individual committing the offense. The Court found that while they had different motivations they had the same intent. Both wanted “to make the illegal venture succeed.” They both “shared the common purpose of consummating the transaction without triggering the federal reporting requirement,” The Sixth Circuit finding both an act and the intent upheld the conviction.