Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-caed-1_07-cr-00240/USCOURTS-caed-1_07-cr-00240-4/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Kimberley Perez
Defendant
USA
Plaintiff

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 Title 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(B) provides that whoever intentionally accesses a computer without 1

authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any department or agency of the

United States, shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) (specified punishments involving a fine or

imprisonment for not more than one year [absent specified circumstances]).

1

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

EASTERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, )

)

Plaintiff, )

)

)

v. )

 )

KIMBERLEY PEREZ, ) 

 )

Defendant. )

)

 )

No. 1:07-CR-00240-SMS

ORDER DENYING DEFENDANT’S MOTION

TO DISMISS (DOC. 12) 

The Defendant’s motion to dismiss came on regularly for

hearing on July 10, 2008, at 10:00 a.m. in Courtroom 7 before the

Honorable Sandra M. Snyder, United States Magistrate Judge.

Douglas J. Beevers appeared on behalf of Defendant; and Mark J.

McKeon appeared on behalf of the government. After argument the

matter was submitted to the Court.

I. Background

Defendant is charged by information with violating 18 U.S.C.

§ 1030(a)(2)(B) , which prohibits unauthorized, intentional 1

access to computer and thereby obtaining information from a

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department or agency of the U.S.A. 

Defendant, by motion filed on February 28, 2008, moves to

dismiss the case because of excessive pre-information delay

asserted to be in violation of the Fifth Amendment Due Process

Clause. Defendant filed opposition on July 3, 2008. The parties

attach various exhibits, consisting mainly of reports of

investigation or interviews and correspondence; there are no

declarations providing foundations for any of this matter, and no

party objects to any of the exhibits submitted. There is one

declaration of a defense investigator, but it concerns efforts to

identify the supervisor of Defendant during the time she worked

for the IRS.

The unauthorized access occurred in 2003 during Defendant’s

seasonal employment with the IRS. Employees were and are

restricted from accessing tax returns for non-business purposes

and are not authorized to access accounts of family, friends, or

acquaintances; in fact, each employee with access to the computer

system is given a restricted TIN file (RTF) which records the

Social Security numbers of related individuals whose records the

employee is not to access. Defendant asserts that until a Social

Security number is in the RTF, it would be difficult to discover

an unauthorized access because the IRS’s Strategic Enforcement

Division (SED) uses computer programs that review computer data

of accounts that the employee accessed and attempt to correlate

those accesses with Social Security numbers recorded in the

employee’s RTF. There is also a protocol by which employees who

have unintentionally or accidentally accessed an unauthorized

account report it, which results in documentation of the

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incident. 

Defendant is charged with accessing the account or number of

her daughter, Savanna Perez, born on January 14, 2000, “on or

about April 24, 2003, through May 30, 2003,” and twenty-four

other individuals’ information, and obtaining information.

Savanna was not added to Defendant’s RTF until 2005, based on a

2004 tax return filed by Defendant. 

In 2005, SED identified a problem and reviewed an audit

trail showing that on April 24, 30, and May 28, 2003, Defendant

made forty-one unauthorized accesses to the accounts of twentyfour taxpayers, including her daughter; for twenty-three of the

taxpayers, the numbers used were variants of her daughter’s

Social Security number.

The government asserts that in 2005, an internal

investigation occurred; then on December 15, 2005, SED made a

criminal referral of the matter to the Treasury Inspector General

for Tax Administration (TIGTA), which began a criminal

investigation. (Govt.’s Opp., Doc. 22-2 p. 2.) The investigation

continued until June 14, 2006 and included 1) contacting in April

2006 the parent of a child whose account was accessed (Mot., Ex.

C, Doc. 12-5 p. 2); 2) interviewing on June 14, 2006, the

supervisor of Defendant in 2005 and 2006 (Teresa Borunda, who did

not recall any reports from Defendant of accidental accesses)

(Deft.’s Memo., Ex. E, Doc. 12-7 p. 1); and 3) interviewing

Defendant on June 16, 2006 (Doc. 22-2, pp. 12-13, and Doc. 12-6,

pp. 2-3). 

The matter was referred to the United States Attorney, and

on July 11, 2006, Defendant was notified by the government of the

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investigation. (Deft.’s Memo., Ex. F, Doc. 12-8 p. 2). On

December 17, 2007, the government responded to Defendant’s

counsel’s request for discovery and identified Defendant’s

supervisor at the time of the violation as Oscar Torrez; the

government further indicated that Torrez was not interviewed but

gave his telephone number. (Deft.’s Memo., Ex. G, Doc. 12-9 pp.

2-3.)

On September 28, 2007, the information was filed. 

Thus, the delay between the occurrence (late April through

late May 2003) and the filing of the formal information was over

four years of the five-year statute of limitations referred to by

Defendant (18 U.S.C. § 3282); the government waited over three

years to interview Defendant. 

II. Analysis

A. Rule 48(b)

Fed. R. Crim. P. 48(b) states that the Court may dismiss an

information if unnecessary delay occurs in filing an information

against a defendant. The application of Rule 48(b) is limited to

post-arrest situations. United States v. Lovasco, 431 U.S. 431,

789 n. 8 (1977); see, United States v. Barken, 412 F.3d 1131,

1136 (9 Cir. 2005). No information is given about Defendant’s th

having been arrested, so it does not appear that this rule alone

(as distinct from Constitutional law) provides a basis for

dismissal.

B. Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause

1. General Standards

Dismissal is an appropriate remedy for violations of the

Fifth Amendment Due Process Clause in the form of pre-accusation

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delay where there is fundamental unfairness, which is established

where the Defendant shows actual prejudice and further

establishes that the delay was undertaken by the government in

bad faith or solely to gain tactical advantage over the accused.

United States v. Lovasco, 431 U.S. 783, 790, 795-96 (1977). In

this circuit, 1) the defendant must prove actual, non-speculative

prejudice from the delay, and 2) the length of the delay, when

balanced against the reason for the delay, must offend

fundamental conceptions of justice which lie at the base of our

civil and political institutions. United States v. Huntley, 976

F.2d 1287, 1290 (9 Cir. 1992). The course of the analysis in th

this circuit is first to determine if the Defendant has met his

or her burden of establishing prejudice, and if prejudice is

shown, then to consider the reasons for the delay; if prejudice

is not shown, then the motion will be denied without

consideration of the government’s reasons. United States v.

Barken, 412 F.3d 1131, 1136.

Protection from lost testimony and other evidence generally

falls within the ambit of the statute of limitations. Huntley,

976 F.2d at 1290. To establish actual prejudice from loss of

testimony, the Defendant must show that the loss has meaningfully

impaired the ability to defend oneself by proof that demonstrates

by definite and non-speculative evidence how the loss of evidence

is prejudicial to the case. Id. The burden of proving actual

prejudice is a heavy one, and the courts apply the test for

prejudice stringently. United States v. Manning, 56 F.3d 1188,

1194 (9 Cir. 1995). th

/////

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2. Prejudice

Here, Defendant argues that now and at the time she was

interviewed in 2006, she lacked any memory of the circumstances

surrounding the events of 2003 or any information to provide to

agents about the alleged accesses. Further, the delay has kept

her from locating and contacting witnesses who could assist in

her defense.

Generalized assertions of the loss of memory, witnesses, or

evidence are insufficient to establish actual prejudice. United

States v. Manning, 56 F.3d 1188, 1194 (9 Cir. 1995). It is th

generally required that if it is claimed that memory has dimmed,

the record must indicate how the witnesses with defective memory

would have testified if the memory had not dimmed. United States

v. Sherlock, 962 F.2d 1349, 1354 (9 Cir. 1992). In Manning, the th

defendant in a prosecution for murder by mail bomb argued that he

lost access to credit card records which could have explained his

location at the time of the killing; his memory was not as keen

after the delay; and a potential key witness for the defense had

died. Where the defendant did not show what the credit card

records would have shown or what the deceased witness would have

said, the showing was conjectural and speculative, and the court

held that it was insufficient to establish actual prejudice. Id. 

Here, as in Manning, Defendant’s generalized assertions

concerning loss of memory or witnesses are insufficient.

Defendant also argues that TIGTA agents interviewed the IRS

employee who supervised Defendant two to three years after the

alleged crime, but never interviewed the employee who supervised

Defendant during the time the crime was alleged to have occurred.

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Defendant also claims that the government misidentified the

person who was her supervisor in discovery. This is based on the

declaration of defense investigator Philip Oliver, who declared

that he had interviewed Torrez, who had told him that he was a

program analyst who briefly acted as a department manager in the

notice review department five or six years ago (this would be

2003 or 2002), but he did not recall ever having been the

supervisor or manager of Defendant or having any conversations

with anyone who was investigating unauthorized access during

2003. Oliver opines that the lapse of time after 2003 allowed

Torrez’s memory to fade and rendered Torrez unable to recall any

information. (Deft.’s Memo., Ex. H, Doc. 12-10, pp. 2-3.)

Defendant argues that in order to convict her of the crime,

it must be proved that she intentionally accessed the information

without authorization or exceeded authorized access to the

system, and that she had the conscious objective to do so. Case

law reveals that Congress intended to require access by one with

a clear intent to enter, without proper authorization, computer

files or data belonging to another. United States v. Sablan, 92

F.3d 865, 868 (9 Cir. 1996). Defendant argues that her th

supervisor would have been the one to whom she would have

reported any unintentional, unauthorized accesses or compromise

of her computer server, login, and password; her supervisor was

the one who could have described Defendant’s job duties and

assignments at the time, and the delay has made it unlikely that

any supervisor would be able to remember anything. Thus, she

could not defend on the ground that her accesses were either

unintentional or authorized.

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This constitutes a generalized assertion regarding a witness

without specification of what the witness might say. It does not

establish a meaningful interference with the ability to defend

onself.

Further, the government argues that there would be

documentation of any accidental or unintended access because a

report was required to be made by the employee upon the happening

of any accidental access, and such a report would exist. Thus,

any problem with identifying Defendant’s supervisor would not be

the cause of the absence of any evidence because independent

documentation would exist. The government’s assertions concerning

the existence of a report were not contradicted by Defendant.

Defendant has thus failed to show that any lack of evidence here

resulted from pre-indictment delay, which is required. See,

United States v. Sherlock, 962 F.2d 1349, 1354 (where a rape kit

was lost, the court noted, inter alia, that the unavailability of

the rape kit had not been shown to have necessarily resulted from

the pre-indictment delay).

Further, the government asserts that while under oath during

an interview in August 2003 by TIGTA special agents about another

incident, Defendant herself identified Oscar Torrez as her

supervisor from January 13, 2003, through Defendant’s June 2003

furlough. (Govt.’s Opp., Doc. 22-2, pp. 9-10.) 

Defendant argues that if the basis for the charge is that

she exceeded authorized access (as distinct from engaging in

unauthorized access), the government would have to prove that she

had authority to access but used the authority to obtain

information that she was not entitled to obtain. However, it

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appears that the government is contending not that she exceeded

access, but rather that she lacked authorization to access her

daughter’s account. Because the twenty-some Social Security

numbers accessed were slight variations of her daughter’s number,

it is inferred that Defendant’s accesses were attempts to get to

her daughter’s account, which she eventually succeeded in doing

and then ceased further attempts. 

Defendant acknowledged that she knew that she was not

permitted to access the accounts of family members and denied any

such access. She further said when interviewed that she always

reviewed returns before making any accesses to make sure she does

not access the account of someone she knows, and she once

received her uncle’s return and turned it over to her supervisor

to reassign (apparently before access). (Govt.’s Memo, Doc. 22-2

p. 12.) Given the pertinent rules, which prohibited access to

family members’ accounts, it is difficult to see how a defense

could be mounted that her job duties required her to do so. This

claim of prejudice thus appears to be speculative or conjectural.

It is therefore concluded that the Defendant failed to show

prejudice, and thus the reasons for the delay need not be

considered. 

3. Reasons for the Delay

In an abundance of caution, the Court will address the

reasons for delay.

For dismissal to be appropriate, the delay must be caused by

the government’s culpability. Generally, prosecutors otherwise

have wide latitude to decide when to seek an indictment. Lovasco,

431 U.S. at 792-95; Sherlock, 962 F.2d 1349, 1355 (9 Cir. th

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1992). 

Here, there has been no showing of any bad faith, tactically

motivated conduct, or other form of culpability on the part of

the government’s agents.

The government’s program to detect the access was based on

Social Security numbers. The passage of time before the filing of

the 2004 tax return in 2005, on which Savanna’s number first

appeared, was innocent and possibly unavoidable by the government

because of lack of knowledge of the existence of the daughter as

someone to be added to the Defendant’s RTF.

The additional delay in 2005 (about eight months at the

least, if April 15 is taken as the day the income tax return was

filed by) and for half of 2006 (Defendant was interviewed on June

14, 2006) is slightly over a year of delay, or about a year and

two or three months. During that time, the investigation

proceeded. Under the circumstances, it cannot be said that the

length of the delay, when balanced against the reason for the

delay, offends fundamental conceptions of justice which lie at

the base of our civil and political institutions.

Therefore, Defendant’s motion to dismiss the information for

pre-accusation delay IS DENIED.

IT IS SO ORDERED.

DATED: July 11, 2008 /s/ Sandra M. Snyder 

SANDRA M. SNYDER

U.S. MAGISTRATE JUDGE

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