Justia U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

Defendant-Appellant Michael Cooper was convicted by jury on one count of conspiracy to defraud, and multiple counts of mail and wire fraud, money laundering and engaging in transactions derived from unlawful activity. Defendant filed several motions with the district court including motions for a judgment of acquittal, a post-verdict motion for a new trial, and a motion to suppress evidence under the Fourth Amendment. The district court denied them all. On appeal, Defendant challenged the district court's denial of those motions. Upon review of the trial court record and the applicable legal authority, the Tenth Circuit found Defendant failed to prove that the evidence presented against him at trial was insufficient to support his convictions. Therefore the Court affirmed the district court's denials of Defendant's motions for judgment of acquittal, for a new trial, and to suppress evidence, and affirmed Defendant's convictions.

Defendant Jodi Hoskins was convicted of tax evasion after she and her husband failed to pay taxes for income they earned through their Salt Lake City escort service. The government contended the Hoskins' failed to account for more than one million dollars in income generated in cash payments and credit card receipts. At sentencing, the government's tax loss was relevant to potential jail time and restitution under the United States Sentencing Guidelines. To minimize the tax loss for sentencing purposes, the Hoskins' offered hypothetical tax returns to account for the unreported income and attempted to take deductions they claimed they would have been entitled to but for the tax evasion. The district court rejected the hypothetical tax returns and accepted the government's tax-loss estimate. Defendant appealed her eventual sentence, arguing the sentencing judge abused his discretion in establishing the lost taxes. Furthermore, Defendant challenged the sufficiency of the evidence presented against her and the reasonableness of her sentence. Finding no abuse of discretion, and that the evidence presented at trial sufficient to support her sentence, the Tenth Circuit affirmed Defendant's conviction.

Defendant Afuhia Masiu Manatau was in the business of stealing identities. Defendant stole social security numbers, credit cards and checks for which he would eventually be charged with and indicted for bank fraud and aggravated identity theft. This case turns on the question of an appropriate sentence. Seeking to calculate the applicable advisory guidelines sentence, the district court had to "identify the greater figure [of the actual or intended loss], and then proceed to one of the guidelines' inevitable charts." The question before the Tenth Circuit in this case is "what counts as an 'intended' loss? Unsurprisingly, [the Tenth Circuit] held that the term means exactly what it says: to be included in an advisory guidelines calculation the intended loss must have been an object of the defendant's purpose." Defendant argued that the government's "intended loss" analysis rested on a legal error. The Court remanded the case to the district court to properly determine Defendant's intended loss compared with the actual loss he caused, and to use the greater of the two to calculate Defendant's applicable sentencing enhancement.

In 2009, Appellant Shawn Merriman approached an "otherwise unsuspecting US Attorney's Office" and disclosed that he had engaged in a long-running Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of over $20 million. At the time of his disclosure, Appellant had offered several million dollars' worth of assets to the government so that it could liquidate them and eventually remit the proceeds to Appellant's victims. Appellant cooperated with authorities throughout the proceedings and ultimately pled guilty to one could each of mail fraud and forfeiture. Appellant appealed two of the district court's sentencing decisions, arguing: (1) the district court should have counted the assets Appellant initially turned over as a 'credit' against his victims' measured aggregate loss; and (2) the court erred by finding he occupied a 'position of trust' for a two-point enhancement. Because Appellant did not challenge the substantive reasonableness of the district court's sentence, the Tenth Circuit reviewed the case on appeal for procedural reasonableness. Finding no clear error in the district court's sentence calculation, the Tenth Circuit affirmed the lower court's sentence.

Defendant Catherine Senninger was convicted on six counts of mail fraud and one count of making a false claim against the Government. She was acquitted on several other counts, including conspiracy and additional mail fraud counts. At trial, the Government presented evidence that Defendant, through her involvement with Olympia Financial and Tax Services, participated in a scheme to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and the Colorado Department of Revenue by preparing false tax returns. Defendant was sentenced to 36 months' imprisonment, which was an upward departure from the advisory guidelines range. Defendant challenged her sentence and subsequent restitution order. Upon review, the Tenth Circuit found the district court "properly rejected" Defendant's arguments. Accordingly, the Court affirmed Defendant's sentence.

Defendant Herman Ransom appealed a district court's denial of his motion for acquittal or for a new trial after he was convicted on wire fraud and theft of public money. Defendant was accused of falsifying his time sheets from work at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). When Defendant took full-day leaves, he listed "8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m." as his working hours. Though an assistant prepared the time sheets, he signed them and a supervisor approved them. The records were then forwarded via wire to a central processing unit. HUD received an anonymous complaint about Defendant's frequent absences from the office, and an internal investigation would reveal the discrepancy in his time sheets. On appeal to the Tenth Circuit, Defendant challenged the validity of the evidence presented against him at trial. Upon review of the record and the applicable legal standard, the Tenth Circuit found sufficient evidence to support Defendant's conviction on wire fraud and theft charges. The Court affirmed the lower court's decision and Defendant's conviction.

Defendant Linda Carnagie entered into a scheme to defraud the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) by using false information to obtain housing loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For a fee, a third party provided fake pay stubs, Social Security Numbers and other requisite documents to persons with no credit or bad credit so that they could apply for FHA-insured home loans. Defendant was one such person who paid for the fake documents. Defendant did not dispute that the loan application she made contained false information, nor did she dispute that her typewritten name appeared on most of the documents. Instead, Defendant argued that she never signed any of the documents and that fact proved she was not involved in the scheme. A jury convicted Defendant on several counts of making false statements. On appeal to the Tenth Circuit, Defendant argued that there was insufficient evidence to convict her of many of those counts, and she also challenged the length of her sentence. Upon consideration of Defendant's arguments, the Court found none persuasive. The Court affirmed Defendant's conviction and sentence.

After a jury trial, Defendant David Hillman was convicted on several money laundering charges arising from a scheme to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from the insurance company for which he worked. Defendant's defense at trial was that he was duped by his then-girlfriend and co-worker, Hillary Shaffer, as to the source of the money. Defendant maintained that Ms. Shaffer told him the money they deposited in their joint bank account came from her grandmother's trust. The trial record revealed that the source of the money came from inactive annuities of the company's clients. On appeal to the Tenth Circuit, Defendant argued multiple errors at trial: prosecutorial misconduct, a violation of his due process rights, and misguided jury instructions all denied him a fair trial. Upon review of Defendant's arguments against the trial record, the Tenth Circuit concluded that none of his claims fundamentally affected the fairness of his trial or were otherwise an abuse of discretion by the trial court. Accordingly, the Court affirmed Defendant's conviction.

Defendant-Appellant Steven Fishman was found guilty of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and to commit money laundering. He was sentenced to 26 months' imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and ordered to pay $3.7 million in restitution. Defendant filed a host of pre-trial motions, all of which were denied. The denial of these motions served as the basis of his appeal to the Tenth Circuit. In particular, Defendant argued that the evidence presented at trial was insufficient to support his conviction and sentence. The Tenth Circuit reviewed the lower court's record, and found the evidence presented was sufficient to support Defendant's conviction and sentence. The Court affirmed Defendant's conviction and sentence.

Defendant Christine Thompson pled guilty to conspiracy and securities fraud. The district court sentenced her to 57 months' imprisonment, three years of supervised release, and ordered her to pay $1.39 million in restitution. On appeal, Defendant argued that the length of her prison sentence was substantially unreasonable. A 64-count indictment charged Defendant and two of her former husbands for their involvement in multiple bogus oil-and-gas drilling projects. Over the course of two years, Defendant defrauded over thirty investors. Defendant argued that her criminal history "over-represented" the seriousness of her prior offenses. Furthermore, Defendant suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, and the after-effects of emotional and physical abuse from family and one of her former husbands. On appeal to the Tenth Circuit, Defendant argued that the district court did not take these mitigating factors into consideration when it sentenced her to prison. The Tenth Circuit found that Defendant could not overcome the "presumption of reasonableness" by demonstrating that her criminal history and mental and emotional conditions entitled her to a lesser sentence. Accordingly, the Court affirmed Defendant's conviction and sentence.