Assault on federal officers or on those assisting them; 18 USC §§ 111 & 1114; Whether a private contractor is a “person” under the statute; United States v. Bedford; United States v. Scurry (Unpub. 6th Cir.); United States v. Luedtke (8th Cir.); United States v. Ama (10th Cir.); United States v. Jacquez–Beltran (5th Cir.); United States v. Murphy (4th Cir.)

The court affirmed defendant-Grant’s conviction for assaulting a federal officer or those who assist them, where he assaulted a private prison guard under contract with the U.S. Marshal Service who performs the same federal duties a federal employee would otherwise fulfill. Grant argued that § 111 did not apply where the prison guard he assaulted was a private contractor assisting a Deputy U.S. Marshal and not a federal employee. “Section 111 criminalizes assaulting ‘any person designated in section 1114 . . . while engaged in or on account of the performance of official duties.’” In turn, § 1114 “includes ‘any officer or employee of the United States or of any agency in any branch in the United States Government . . . or any person assisting such an officer or employee in the performance of such duties.’” Grant claimed that the victim was not assisting a "specific officer or employee" but instead was hired to assist a federal agency, the U.S. Marshal Service. Thus, he contended that the private contractor was not a “person” under § 111. But the court noted that this argument was foreclosed by Bedford, where it held that a contract mail carrier delivering mail for the USPS was a “person designated” under § 1114. Here, “Grant’s victim was a private prison guard supervising the housing of federal inmates according to a contract with the Marshals Service. If not the victim, a federal employee would have been carrying out those same duties. In that way, the victim was a ‘person assisting an officer or employee [of the United States] in the performance of [official duties],’ making the assault committed upon her a violation of § 111.” The court noted that several other circuits had reached the same conclusion. It acknowledged that cases like Bedford “risk some expansion of federal law to criminalize conduct historically regulated at the state and local level[,]” but left this issue to Congress.