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The 'New' Willful Blindness Doctrine After Global-Tech
Prosecutors striving to avoid proving “knowledge” in criminal cases are increasingly resorting to theories like the “responsible corporate officer” doctrine, where jail time is available despite a lack of knowledge of wrongdoing, and the “collective knowledge” doctrine, where employee knowledge is aggregated to prove corporate wrongdoing. But no approach has proven more popular than arguing that “willful blindness” is the same as actual knowledge. Under this theory, a defendant's deliberate attempt to avoid learning a fact is treated as legally equivalent to “actual knowledge” of it. The widespread use of willful blindness ' also known as “deliberate ignorance” or “conscious avoidance” ' is part of a trend toward weakening the mens rea requirement in criminal prosecutions.
Although recognized in most courts, this doctrine has not been universally embraced. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, for instance, hesitated to endorse the concept (see United States v. Alston-Graves, 435 F.3d 331, 339'41 (D.C. Cir. 2006)), while other courts have cautioned that it should be used sparingly (see, e.g., United States v. Alvarado, 838 F.2d 311, 314 (9th Cir. 1988) (instruction should be “rarely given”)). Recently, however, willful blindness received the Supreme Court's imprimatur, albeit in the most unlikely of places: a civil patent dispute.
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