In United States v. Buselli, No. 23-10272 (July 11, 2024) (Jordan, Lagoa, Hull), the Court affirmed Ms. Buselli’s convictions for murder for hire and making false statements to a federal agent, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1958(a) and 1001(a), respectively.
The murder-for-hire plot was intended for Ms. Buselli’s ex-boyfriend
or some other third party to murder Ms. Buselli’s estranged husband. The related
jury instruction provided that “[m]urder is the unlawful, premeditated killing
of a human being with malice aforethought and is a violation of the laws of the
State of Florida.” The Court rejected Ms. Buselli’s claim that this instruction
needed to include language concerning Florida’s defenses of justifiable and
excusable homicide and justifiable use of deadly force because such defenses could
have resulted in a lawful killing. In any event, the Court added, the district
court’s failing to provide defense instructions was harmless. Florida law on
the defenses required evidence that Ms. Buselli sought either third party to kill the husband by accident or misfortune, or in an effort to defend
Ms. Buselli herself from an attempted murder or from a forcible felony by the
husband. But the record contained no such evidence. Additionally, evidence of the
steps Ms. Buselli took to arrange for the husband’s killing belied argument
that she intended to prevent an imminent forcible felony, as Florida law also
required.
As to the false-statement conviction, Ms. Buselli made two statements to
investigators: “I would never ask anyone to do something like this,” and “I don’t
want something to happen to him.” The Court doubted that these statements—which
were made after Ms. Buselli had been Mirandized and told that lying to a
federal agent was a crime—were akin to pleading not guilty or demanding a jury
trial under the Sixth Amendment. And given the lack of cited statutory text or binding
precedent directly resolving such doubt, the Court held that Ms. Buselli’s
false-statement conviction did not constitute plain error. Nor did the district
court plainly err in instructing the jury on the false-statement statute’s mens rea elements.
