United States v. Bradley Matheny, No. 21-3712 (8th Cir. 2022)
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Defendant was convicted on seven counts of forging or counterfeiting postage meter stamps and three counts of smuggling the district court sentenced Defendant to 36 months’ imprisonment and ordered him to pay $256,441.78 in restitution to the United States Postal Service (“USPS”). Defendant appealed challenging the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his convictions, the district court’s estimate of the face value of the counterfeit stamps for purposes of calculating his advisory sentencing guidelines range, the amount of restitution ordered, and the substantive reasonableness of his prison sentence.
The Eighth Circuit affirmed Defendant’s convictions, but vacated the district court’s restitution order and remanded for the district court to limit the restitution award to the loss due to forgery, and otherwise affirmed Defendant’s sentence. The court held that Defendant’s sufficiency-of-the-evidence challenge fails as to all counts if it is construed as a request for a judgment of acquittal. And it fares no better if construed as a request for a new trial. To prevail on this claim, even assuming he did not forfeit it, Defendant would need to show that “the evidence weigh[ed] heavily” against the verdict. Here, the evidence did not weigh heavily against the verdict but rather provided ample support for it. Moreover, the court found that neither statute of conviction lists as an element a scheme, conspiracy, or pattern of criminal activity. Therefore, restitution to the USPS should have been limited to “the loss caused by the specific conduct that is the basis of” Defendant’s forgery convictions.
Court Description: [Gruender, Author, with Benton and Grasz, Circuit Judges] Criminal case - Criminal law and sentencing. The evidence was sufficient to support defendant's convictions for making a forged or counterfeited postage meter stamp where he created hybrid shipping labels which permitted him to send his packages by priority mail when he had only paid for first class service; the evidence also supported convictions for his attempts to send merchandise to foreign countries after mislabeling the packages to obtain cheaper rates or avoid customs duties; the district court did not err in calculating the amount of the loss based on the face value of the counterfeit labels; the restitution order is set aside because the amount of restitution included should have been limited to the amount on the forged labels and not the loss caused by defendant's underweighting of packages; remanded for further fact finding on the issue of restitution; defendant's sentence, a downward variance, was not substantively unreasonable. [ July 27, 2022 ]
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