Pierre Yvelt Almonor v. United States

The Constitution’s Venue Clause provides that “the Trial of all Crimes * * * shall be held in the State where the said Crimes shall have been committed.” U.S. Const. art. III, § 2, cl. 3. The Vicinage Clause likewise guarantees criminal defendants the right to trial “by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.” Id. amend. VI. In this case, petitioner was convicted of conspiracy in the Western District of North Carolina though his own actions had no nexus to that State. Venue rested entirely on acts petitioner did not know about, undertaken by a co-conspirator he did not know existed. The only connection between petitioner and his purported co-conspirator was a shared “hub” who directed multiple parallel but otherwise unconnected scams. The questions presented are:

1. Whether—as the Second Circuit holds but the Third, Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits deny—for a co-conspirator’s act to justify criminal venue, it must have been reasonably foreseeable to the defendant that the act would occur in the district where venue is sought.

2. Whether proving a single hub-and-spoke conspiracy requires proof of a connection between the spokes beyond shared methods of criminality and involvement with the hub—as this Court held in the seminal case of Kotteakos v. United States, 328 U.S. 750 (1946)—or whether, as the court below determined, a single conspiracy can be proved through “overlap of the key actors [i.e., the hub individuals] and the same methods, goals, nature, and results in each * * * scheme[].” App., infra, 6a.