United States v. Hearns, No. 16-40222 (5th Cir. 2017)
Annotate this CaseAfter defendant was convicted of one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud, the district court attributed loss amounts from nine additional transactions that allegedly occurred within the same scheme to defraud mortgage lenders when calculating her advisory range under the Sentencing Guidelines. The court concluded that defendant failed to demonstrate any ex post facto error in her conviction; the district court did not err when it did not instruct the jury that it must find that Countrywide is a "residential mortgage lender" and there was no constructive amendment; but the the district court erred procedurally in determining that the loss amount for which she was responsible totaled $865,940.18, thereby miscalculating her Sentencing Guidelines advisory range. In this case, the district court clearly erred when it relied on the presentencing report to include the loss amounts for six properties in its calculation of defendant's base offense level. Accordingly, the court affirmed the conviction, vacated the sentence, and remanded for resentencing.
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