thank you your honor he was charged with five counts of filing false tax returns and one count of obstructing i r s operations after two day trial in the district court in little rock he was convicted and he was sentenced to twenty seven months on appeal mr matthews challenges the sufficiency of the evidence on it as to both the obstruction charge and the five counts of filing a false return i recognize that it is high burden to ask you to reverse a criminal conviction on sufficiency the evidence but i think this case might warrant it the standard of review is to know but you basically give all the breaks to to the the verdict if any rational jury could find under those facts then it has to be affirmed however a verdict cannot be affirmed on just speculation the challenge that we raise to the five  tax returns as is the specific criminal intent that's necessary to sustain that charge mr matthews was audited in one nine hundred ninety nine he'd been conducting the same type of business for over twenty five years that he thought that meant that he was doing everything ok and he continued to report his income and returns the same way so rather than evidence of criminal intent that suggests evidence of good faith reliance on iris advice that he was doing things the right way and so that that's the opposite of criminal intent the it was referred again for an audit in two thousand and five and after several interviews with the agent that was eventually referred to a criminal case and these charges were brought at trial the government produced a spreadsheet based on mr matthews two bank accounts that showed all of the income over the course of five years that flowed through those two bank accounts the government  that income to mr matthews is tax taxable income that he didn't report that evidence is inherently misleading because it's only one side of the equation the only thing they even attempted to account for was income there was testimony that there would be business deductions that would come out of that income that that was not all profit that was only the gross income and those numbers did not account for any of those deductions now mr matthews testified cracked yes he did and did he provid information about this business deduction not specifically no your honor no in general he said i didn't make all that money that was in the way his business work does a lot of that money flowed through him and was paid to other individuals and that he did not rebut that in detail but he testified that that's not all profit to me were there any records on the payments to other individuals scant  but with all due respect i think it's the government's burden to prove taxable income not just to prove gross income from all sources but to prove that that income is actually set to tax and that this red sheet that was the government's main piece of evidence didn't because after he'd heard the two days of evidence and at the sentencing judge leon holmes commented that belief has nothing to do with this case there was never any evidence that any money flowed through billy's if this case wasn't about b billie's was an extraneous fact that had no bearing on the income that the government was trying to impute to mr matthews but they just kept saying billy's over and over again because it's an electric word it tended to make him look bad and that's that's the other criticism i have of the book of the government's evidence in this case is it doesn't relate to this income that they claim that he didn't pay taxes on it relates to things that were not charged offenses the government's been an inordinate amount of time talking about mr matthews businesses wealth team international and there's another one and what these are they're internet based multilevel marketing enterprises their referral things where somebody pays you one hundred dollars and you pay somebody else ninety dollars and it goes on down the chain i don't pretend to understand how they work personally i'm suspicious of those type of things and i think the jurors probably were too but that the bottom line is that didn't have anything to do with the charges against mr ma it was more evidence it just kind of tended to make him look like a bad guy other evidence the government sites too is that auditors testimony miss bowman from one nine hundred ninety nine she said he was asking about how to erase his social security number or whether the government actually had authority to collect taxes and she assured him that you can't do that and again that has nothing to do with the charges in this case mr matthews wasn't charged with failing to follow returns he did file returns there no evidence that he ever tried to hide his social security number from anyone but that's just more stuff that the government stacks up which tends to make mr matthews look like a bad guy but it has absolutely nothing to do with the charged defenses and that's the type of evidence that i suggest is speculative it's speculation it's something that can't support a jury's verdict finding specific intent to commit a criminal act did you object to the inclusion of that evidence at trial there i was not trial counsel my recollection is there were not many contemporaneous objections about those things but there were directed verdict motions on intent so i contend that it's preserved in the direct moving to the obstruction charge obstructing i r s operations through a corrupt act i'm not sure exactly what the corrupt act is that supports this is it from the government's case but judge holmes at the at the conclusion commented about a lot i that he said mr matthews told when investigators from the i r s were at his home for a six hour interrogation pursuant to a warning  a warrant and mr matthew said there was no cash in the house and subsequently they found there was cash in the house again there isn't that that cash was not c sed that cash was not included in the spreadsheet of things that they allege that he didn't pay tax on it's not an element of any offense and there's no evidence that he stood to gain anything by by lying about the cash or perhaps he just forgot it was there so i don't think that piece of evidence supports a charge of obstructing government operations refresh my memory which games there were two as i recall there was a two thousand dollars in one box and ten thousand in another box and that that money was released to mr matthews it wasn't seized and it wasn't an element of any of the charge defenses so i know it's a high hurdle to ask him out of filing didn't file some claims against the i r s agents he complained about his treatment think you know a person's entitle to complain about what they feel is a overbearing interrogation or something like that but that that's kind of he just filed a complaint through some administrative process at the i r s that's my understanding your honor and that there was a investigation in that there were no findings but again i don't think that's part of the record now think that's an element that was charged of any offense and i think a citizen is in time to complain about their treatment of the hands of a government agency if they feel like it's unfair so with that said i'm going to reserve the balance of my time from both thank you her it bribe the prosecutor the judge all that was put in for count six and it's all out on the superseding indictment those are all part of count six the corrupt persuade in the obstruction part it's all that was propped part of the case it was something we had  of count six where did he file these claims about the agents with the i r s you know it to the it's called tick the treasury yeah i mean inspector just corrected you know i can't remember the name and knew did and the government's position is that these were false try to get a nine thousand dollars bribe in two thousand and eight he said these agents told me a story about if i don't cooperate there was some people in texas and cops in texas that killed kids and this could happen to my kids i mean just outrageous stories that he was the revenue agent he testified the origination testified that when i first started talking to him in two thousand and seven he told me he had one account then up and others another and so it just goes on and on and on now as to the money as to the no expenses actually the internal revenue schedule c says list your gross receipts we could prove through the bank documents of mr of mr matthews how much money he got into it either as personal account or into an account which he only controlled through this this m m f stuff and for example in two thousand and four he got sixty three thousand dollars came in to him with this gross receipts which he should've put on his tax returns he puts thirty four hundred dollars or thirty five hundred dollars well he could have taken expenses except the agent eric williams testified that the expenses which is the money he paid back to all the people sitting money were coming out of pay pal and coming out of the gold in all these internet service so he was getting it after the expenses were paid and so he should have put that on his tax return and that was the whole point of putting how much money he got every year and what's what's interesting is the first two years four and five he fell joint returned he got then when and six he said he had zero income and we could show he had fifty seven thousand then thermally crawford the revenue agent talked to him and then he changed to start filing individual tax return to not joint tax returns records show me the bank records where you have the expenses where you paid expenses out he couldn't find a single one because they're not there and then he said well there's another account that you just didn't find it at the same back well we all know that's not true but that but what about that piece is yes it was all in the record that your man made these false allegations against the agents i thought i thought maybe i misunderstood but i thought you were suggesting that that was not in the record there was nothing in the record about that judge i'm not going to that mr harris knows the record better than i do he tried this case i'm not argue with him about that but i'm going to suggest that you could now don't think you can charge a criminal offense for a citizen making a complaint about the people that are charging him with a criminal when asked if it's a good faith complaint but at some point if it's false and vexatious don't you suppose that could be sufficient you know think so mr matthews and and i'm torn on how to say this judge but he has e u has a deeply held personal belief that that he was persecuted in this  right ok thank you very much thank you