United States v. Beecroft, No. 12-10175 (9th Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CaseDefendant was convicted of charges related to her participation in an extensive mortgage-fraud conspiracy and was ordered to pay more than $2 million in restitution and to forfeit more than $100 million. The court rejected defendant's contention that the restitution amount was not supported by adequate evidence and that it violated the Eighth Amendment where the district court explicitly stated that it would calculate loss through the method defendant advocates. Defendant's bare speculation on appeal that this process was somehow deficient does not approach her burden of demonstrating clear or obvious error in the court’s restitution calculations. Without error in the loss calculation, defendant's Eighth Amendment claim fails. The court rejected defendant's challenges to the order of monetary forfeiture imposed at sentencing, concluding that defendant's bare assertion that the district court needed more evidence to make an accurate accounting of the loan proceeds falls far short of her burden of demonstrating clear or obvious error in the district court’s calculation.Furthermore, it is not anomalous to order her jointly and severally liable, along with the other participants in that conspiracy, for the total amount of money that was illegally gained by the conspiratorial enterprise. Finally, the court concluded that the order of forfeiture is punitive and therefore subject to Eighth Amendment excessiveness review. The court vacated the order with respect to Count 1 and remanded for reconsideration of that amount in light of the Eighth Amendment's Excessive Fines Clause. The court affirmed the order of restitution and the amounts of forfeiture ordered on defendant's convictions for Counts 10, 11, 13, and 14.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel affirmed an order of restitution and the amounts of forfeiture on the defendant’s convictions for Counts 10, 11, 13, and 14; vacated $107 million in forfeiture ordered on her conviction on Count 1; and remanded for reconsideration of the appropriate amount of such forfeiture, in a case in which the defendant was convicted for participating in an extensive mortgage-fraud conspiracy. The panel held that the defendant’s bare speculation that the process employed by the district court in calculating the losses incurred by the victim banks was somehow deficient does not approach her burden of demonstrating clear or obvious error in the district court’s restitution calculations. Rejecting the defendant’s Eighth Amendment challenge to the restitution order, the panel wrote that without error in the loss calculation, the defendant cannot show that requiring her to pay that amount back to the victims was somehow excessive or grossly disproportional to her crimes. The panel noted that the district court required the defendant to pay slightly more than $2 million of the more-than-$50 million in losses caused by the conspiracy in which she participated. The panel held that the district court did not err in calculating the proceeds of her criminal activity when imposing the order of money forfeiture. The panel rejected the defendant’s contention that the district court needed to UNITED STATES V. BEECROFT 3 take additional evidence to determine the “accurate” amount of loan proceeds obtained by the conspiracy, where the defendant has not argued, let alone demonstrated, what “good reason” the court had to believe that the government’s proposed forfeiture amount exceeded the proceeds of her crimes. The panel wrote that this court has previously rejected the argument that a defendant should not be ordered to forfeit the total loan proceeds, where the defendant never personally received the money but instead made only a small commission on each transaction. The panel held that the order of forfeiture imposed against the defendant personally at sentencing is punitive and therefore subject to Eighth Amendment excessiveness review. The panel held that the amounts of forfeiture ordered on the defendant’s four subsidiary counts of conviction ($330,000; $305,000; $325,000; and $460,000) are not excessive, given the gravity of the offenses, and that the amounts are substantially less than the $1 million maximum fine authorized by statute and the Sentencing Guidelines range. The panel held that the $107 million forfeiture order on the conspiracy count, which is 100 times greater than the maximum fine allowable and 5,000 times greater than the lower end of the Guidelines range, runs afoul of the Excessive Fines Clause. The panel remanded for the district court to reconsider that amount. 4 UNITED STATES V. BEECROFT
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