constitutional error in circumscribing cross examination and key areas of bias and motive and also in barring the defendant from responding to certain lines of questioning by the government additionally we have an issue a significant issue with regard to the computation of the guidelines and this is whether the district court erred at sentencing and determining both the last amount and the number of victims without evidence of a rule here that in a bankruptcy fraud case all increase in just this last amount and the government in the support looks to the score going to see why it has to be that broad and what you have here is a fairly unusual pattern of years of fraudulent filings to too little off the condominium association  or spending and then extraordinary manner and going into debt for necessary reasons or for reasons related to poverty and in the govern quest diagnostics which date was unknown dental profile and even fox lake animal hospital presumably for a pet of miss williams this kind of jacked does not to the kind of chat that we look at as being assessed to a defendant that argument might make some sense in a garden variety bankruptcy prog case but that's not what this is this is a chapter thirteen bankruptcy fraud case involving repetitive strategic manipulation of chapter thirteen to take advantage of the automatics day and also fraudulent transfers of the home and so on you know the facts better than i do so if i it struck me as very sensible for the district judge to calculate boss amount say that she did here because the course of conduct involved it was very clear from the proofs that your client was strategically using these chapter thirteen bankruptcy filings over and over again l creditors in a fraudulent way with no intention of complying with a payment plan such as continuing to let the debt accumulate so you know it struck me as very sensible in this situation not not at all unfair which is the essence of your argument that it's not fair for this loss amount to include medical bills etc and that really was the thrust of the government's theory at trial which was that the stay was being utilized for the purpose of staying in her hole right and that was substantiated and she's found guilty and and the the district court used that sensible theory to calculate the lost amount i think under this court this actually very conservative amount a conservative measure of loss to the creditors because that's what she intended regine and likely much more so this was in my judgment a very conservative estimate of the last amount garbus of whether she assuming the government is correct in taking your honour's question at that value assuming that she fraudulent use the stay that does not mean that she did not have lawful debt this actually a rule that would take all of the debt that she had wired for reasons that were of personal need a personal health use and to call that acquisition of debt fraudulent because we do have to your honor look at how debt was acquired and when it was acquired there it has to result from a criminal action and i don't think there's any allegation here that ms williams sought medical attention for criminal purpose and we have some other cases in the circuit that talk about when someone doesn't have any ability to pay back that there is no loss amount considered at all we've seen that in other contexts and i might fact even a little bit more and think about the underlying reason why we go through the last calculation it is to assure that what is allowable is in and what is not allowable is kept out and there are rules that say that certain debt cannot be counted towards the balance and the utilization of the bankruptcy process does not time make some payments towards this debt a significant amount in the in the first bankruptcy before failing to make payments twenty thousand proximately in on board and we do see a story told through these filings that someone who is struggling to get on top of their d but she doesn't final a different kind of chapter bankruptcy she doesn't try to completely discharge the start she's a tempting to manage us and we don't have any of unknowns that at all in the record anywhere that any of these other scheffer and carolyn patterson we have touched him only from certain creditors one creditor the south commons condominiums association that's what we have in the record that's the evidence that we have and they certainly testif loss and i think there is a very strong argument that that is appropriate measure of loss in fact that's what we argued at sentencing below because evidence had been established this is a really low threshold for the government to meet and yet there government we believe that by its emotive evidence goes to the very core of the sixth amendment and thus to novo review should apply here the government cannot show that this is harmless beyond a reasonable doubt look at the kind decisions the district judge was making here about the extent of permitted cross examination is about as discretionary his trial management comes how does it become to no a didn't see in your brief was real engagement with judge kendall's rationale for allowing some of the cross examination and limiting others well there was completely mutations that certain cross examination where the government was permitted to ask the witness whether or not they had any issue with mr williams and treated her let me back that up whether they treated her any differently than anyone else the government of the court completely barred any inquiry from the defense as to whether in fact that was true so we have is in that regard we have an unanswered question and i would have a district judges explanation of that seeing that it is she understood the the line of questioning you know was designed to invite jury nullification of the validity of the underlying likely to confuse the jury stray from the actual issues the jury needed to decide that sounds to me like an area where district judge gets a fair amount of leeway and i understand that your honor but nevertheless bias and motive evidence is always relevant for a jury to examine how a person would engage in front of the jury yesterday's question these witnesses were presenting to the jury as squeaky clean as they had no issue and no potential bias that is what was fronted by the government by being unable to answer that in any way for sixth amendment rights were circumscribed and this becomes a nother example of how the government in this case was allowed to put in certain evidence and the defense was not allowed to answer it which would truly infer the power dynamics at play if i may reserve that balance for a bottle you went thank   the numerous fraudulent acts that show recently is committed during this period of time as well as her failure to an all essential pay any of these bankruptcy court approved repayment plans demonstrates that she never intended to use the bankruptcy system to get her financial life in order but mather she was hiding behind the automatic state of bankruptcy laws to prevent her creditors each and every one of them from taking any action to collect the money that was owed to them and that in fact not only prevented them from collecting on the older debts but as the years went on it allowed her to incur even more debts the theater passed addressing first the issue with respect to the amount of loss and the number of victims calculations as you've seen from the briefs from both sides so there's no real case law directly on point for this precise set of circumstances prevents for creditors from collecting the debts that they are owed in the defendant's reply brief and there's a statement to the effect that this is not a case in which the debtor has concealed assets from the creditors in which the debtor is front functionally money from which the creditors could collect funds but essentially that is quite similar to this case here by by filing all these bankruptcy cases by being in a virtual perpetual state of bankruptcy the defendant by causing all of her assets to be beyond the reach of her creditors which is increasing in time over the number over the years that is the crime doesn't really matter whether or not the some of the  expenses were incurred for what we call a legitimate medical expense or whatever the crime is preventing all of her creditors from being able to collect on any of the debt and her intent in this case to harm all of her creditors is shown by a number of factors some of which judge hamilton referred to for example the the continuous increase in the amount of the number of or the value of her liabilities as reported by the defendant herself in the multiple bankruptcy cases that she filed the year after year along with the continuous chemistry along with the continuous decrease in her assets and another factor that shows her intent to harm all of her creditors as her actual failure to pay virtually any of her creditors while she was in these many chapter thirteen cases having to make payments to all of her creditors under a court approved plans could you address more directly though for example the medical debt s issue here what's at issue is that these the medical expenses as well as all of her other expenses all the debts that she owes are unable to be collected deprive her creditors because she has filed a bankruptcy petition final report and the show actual harm to the creditors not just the one creditor about whom there was trial testimony but all these exhibits that came in show by the defendant's own admission that she had dozens and dozens of from the final report of the trustee from the two thousand and four case shows that only true of her creditors were paid a grand total of four hundred thirty two dollars rounding up while another twenty one creditors got nothing bankruptcy fire or bankruptcy case where a person simply goes into bankruptcy this is a i case in which a defendant has filed five consecutive bankruptcy chapter thirteen cases with the intent of not paying d she she could have actually probably should have filed that you don't ask about the amounts of assets sources liabilities and that and by the time she filed her third bankruptcy case her assets were well below the amount of her liabilities i think by close to one hundred thousand dollars at that point she she certainly should not have been filing these chapter thirteen cases in which she's portraying herself as a doubter who's in some a bit of a financial pinch at the moment but who who has a means of repaying her creditors and landing on her feet in fact that's another part of the in the fraud in this case is when she filed her later petitions for bankruptcy under chapter thirteen she made false statements in a number of the different filings that the pleadings that schedules that were submitted to the bankruptcy court in order to simply get the chapter thirteen plan approved for example in the third bankruptcy case she falsely claimed that this other man occurred wealthy was a code outer with respect to walk and mortgage and then he was contributing over twelve hundred dollars to thirty over thirteen hundred dollars a mortgage and a car loan and that he was contributing over thirteen hundred dollars per month toward for mortgages while making monthly payments on the car loan and again that made it possible for her to even get a chapter thirteen plan accepted in he was making payments on that as well as that he was a collab with or with her on both mortgages on her condo and that he was contributing a total of over eight hundred dollars per month towards that if she hadn't included those false statements about all the other money that she had coming in she would not have had a plan that would have been accepted by the bankruptcy trustee or the bankruptcy court she would have had sufficient income reported to to cover all the  that went on with respect to this condo in which she cheated ransford title first in two thousand and five to wilkie but then flip flop it right back to herself not reporting the second half of that transaction making it appear  that wilkie had title to to the property that allowed at that time in two thousand and five that allowed wilkie to get a mortgage or two mortgages combined for a total of two hundred forty thousand dollars almost a fifty percent increase over what she had been able to get under her own name it was just additional debt that she acquired in the course of this scheme that she never had any intention of repaying and in fact couldn't repay because  generalize a little bit here i was asking you for the counterfactual i haven't really heard one but that's not necessarily and the lack of an answer i mean one one approach in these sorts of situations is to say that look it's the it's the defendant who has caused the great uncertainty here with this continuing pattern of fraudulent activity that makes it impossible to determine with any real perception what would have happened but for the crime and doubts basically get resolved in favor of the government and we expect history judges to be reasonable and to do something sensible here you know you know in a difficult problem is that what you're arguing are you simply because i'm troubled by the notion of the kind of automatically any increases and it should be begin i'd say it began with with her filing the first and the very first papers yes so certainly by the time of her second bankruptcy case she was taking you know the reason i ask you you you  t this case and it may well be that it's a little unique you know i hope it's very unique i understand about i'm just trying to put it in perspective and in  yet she failed to pay for it's been a year or a little over a year she had failed to make so many payments at the bankruptcy trustee went into court to seek to have the case dismissed because she was not complying with the plan that she herself  we wouldn't be here today we would have charged that case and in the first instance in fact there's testimony at a trial that the majority of cases do not end up with the the completion of the payment plan but that we're not  of the problem in this case and what makes this a criminal case is that william went back a second third fourth fifth time and after the judge in the fifth case dismissed it and said all these cases have been bad faith i'm barring from filing anything else for one hundred eighty days at that point when the kind of association was free to go to state court and actually follow through on the fiction that actually they tried to brain she then brings mr wilkie back into the picture gives him a bankruptcy process so to say from the very beginning that there are some sense of certainty about where her intent talk a place from trying to discharge her debt to something more unlawful and of course we contrast that i think render all other serial filings potentially fraudulent there are many reasons that were justified to a trial as to why someone might have serial filings and the race is in reply and i think there's an issue with the fact that we don't really know what persuaded the jury here this was an unusual case we don't have a specific verdict we don't know what they just turned to be fraudulent and i will say that this is not an impossible task to calculate loss here this is actually relatively common in fraud cases you have bank records you have expenditures you have records that can easily just discern what was going on with loss to take this that's for an actual last measure this was an intended last measure all parties here agree this was actually an actual intended or the actual or position was there was no intended lost mr williams was trying to gain control of the property that meant so very much to her and was hoping against all hopes that this would work out have been put at issue and the substantial record that all she was trying to do here was save her property not not ignore medical debt or not ignore the parking tickets that she had gotten but try and keep this property that much so much for her we would be in a very different posture and so with that we would ask that you would vacate her conviction and remand from the trial based on the six the