In Boyle v. United States,1 the U.S. Supreme Court revisited the definition of “enterprise” in the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO),2 an issue it first decided in 1981 in United States v. Turkette.3 The Court held that an enterprise must have some structure, but declined to require “an ascertainable structure beyond that inherent in the pattern of racketeering activity.” To require the jury in a criminal case to find an enterprise had an ascertainable structure, the Court concluded, would be “redundant and potentially misleading.”
In the Court’s view, to find the pattern of racketeering activity and enterprise beyond a reasonable doubt would necessarily mean that the enterprise providing the scaffolding for the RICO pattern would be ascertainable. The level of confidence required by that higher evidentiary standard means that unless the jury determined the RICO structure to be ascertainable, it could not find that it was proven. Moreover, in some cases, the enterprise and pattern elements are coterminous, the Court concluded.
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