Photo: Jason Doiy

A federal appeals court has upheld a defendant's conviction of conspiracy to distribute crystal meth, rejecting his argument that the judge's jury charge on circumstantial evidence was faulty because it was not lifted verbatim from the court's model jury instructions.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit denied defendant Francisco Ramos' appeal seeking a new trial.

"There is more than one way to shear a sheep. And there is certainly more than one way to instruct a jury properly. While pattern jury instructions are often sound templates, they are not holy writ," Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote in the Third Circuit's Monday nonprecedential opinion. "Judges are free to adapt them or adopt their own phrasing, so long as their instructions taken as a whole explain the law clearly and correctly. Here, Francisco Ramos argues that two jury instructions were wrong. But they did not plainly misstate the law."

Ramos argued at trial that he was not guilty because he had not entered into any criminal agreement, according to Bibas. At Ramos' trial, the judge instructed the jury on the law regarding circumstantial evidence and conspiracies. He was subsequently convicted.

Ramos raised two challenges against the circumstantial evidence instruction, arguing that the judge should have instructed the jury to weigh competing inferences when evaluating circumstantial evidence, according to Bibas. In his second challenge, Ramos argued that the judge's example of circumstantial evidence was flawed because it permitted only one possible explanation.

Judge Stephanos Bibas, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM

"Ramos argues that the judge should have told the jury that it had a duty to weigh the competing inferences one could draw from circumstantial evidence, not to identify a single correct inference," Bibas said. "To be sure, the court must tell the jury to weigh competing inferences. But Ramos's claim fails because the judge instructed the jury on precisely this issue."

Bibas also said the judge's example of circumstantial evidence was sufficient.

"The judge's illustration was simple enough: We enter a building one morning under clear skies. When we leave in the afternoon, we see 10 feet of snow outside," Bibas said. "Though we did not see it happen, '[w]e can conclude based on [the] reasonable evidence in front of us that a blizzard happened during the day.' As the judge put it, '[w]e never saw it, but the evidence is there.' This is a variant of our model instruction: if we see someone enter a building with a wet raincoat and a wet umbrella, we may reasonably infer that it was raining."

Ramos claimed that those scenarios were open to alternate interpretations and were misleading to the jury.

"No matter the form of precipitation, in each case the most obvious inference is clear. The point of the judge's example, and of our model instruction, is to explain the idea of circumstantial evidence simply and without referring to the facts of the crime charged. The judge's example did just that. While the rain example is preferable for the reasons Ramos notes, the snow example was sensible too," Bibas said.

Similarly, Bibas said the conspiracy instruction was proper.

"Ramos also argues that the judge's conspiracy instruction erred by diverging from our model instruction in two ways: it called conspiracies inherently secretive, and it noted that they are often proven by circumstantial evidence. Neither argument comes close to showing error, let alone plain error," Bibas said.

Ramos' public defender, Catherine C. Henry, did not respond to a request for comment; nor did the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.