In the posts below, I discussed a district court order holding that Chris Kokenis, an accused tax evader, had to take the stand to assert the "good faith defense." On the day before Thanksgiving, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued its opinion. It finds that the district court was wrong to rule that Kokenis had to take the stand, because evidence of good faith can be proved by circumstantial evidence and hearsay statements of the defendant. But the court goes on to conclude that the error was harmless because (1) there was no evidence at all of a good-faith belief in this case; (2) even the supposed good-faith didn't apply to all the charges; (3) the good-faith defense was in fact part of the charge, since the jury was instructed that Kokenis's conduct had to be "willful" and the good-faith defense is simply an assertion that the defendant did not act willfully.
ORIGINAL POST: 10/9/2010
Willfully evading federal income taxes is a felony. 26 U.S.C. § 7201
This is background for an interesting little order by the always-entertaining Judge Milton Shadur of the Northern District of Illinois in the case of United States v. Kokenis. A jury recently found Kokenis guilty on eight counts of tax evasion. He moved for a new trial, arguing that the judge improperly excluded evidence relating to his good-faith defense under Cheek. Judge Shadur denies the motion for an interesting reason: he says that Kokenis could not advance this defense because he did not take the stand to testify in his own defense:
