Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-15-03094/USCOURTS-ca7-15-03094-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Jacqueline Brewer
Appellant
United States of America
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Argued November 15, 2016

Decided December 19, 2016

Before

 DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge

 WILLIAM J. BAUER, Circuit Judge

 DIANE S. SYKES, Circuit Judge

No. 15-3094

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.

JACQUELINE BREWER,

Defendant-Appellant.

Appeal from the United States 

District Court for the Northern District 

of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 13-CR-292

Edmond E. Chang,

Judge.

O R D E R

This appeal marks the second time that Jacqueline Brewer has appeared before 

us challenging her sentence for aggravated identity theft, 18 U.S.C. § 1028A(a)(1), and 

fraudulent use of a social security number, 42 U.S.C. § 408(a)(7)(B). During the first 

appeal, Brewer and the government filed a joint motion for remand in which Brewer 

represented that she intended “to challenge only the district court’s imposition of 

certain conditions of supervised release.” The government conceded that resentencing 

was warranted in light of United States v. Thompson, 777 F.3d 368 (7th Cir. 2015), and on 

that basis we summarily vacated Brewer’s sentence and remanded for resentencing. 

Brewer now argues that on remand the district court erred by applying a 2-level 

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

Case: 15-3094 Document: 38 Filed: 12/19/2016 Pages: 5
No. 15-3094 Page 2

upward adjustment for obstruction of justice, an increase that also was given to her at 

her initial sentencing. See U.S.S.G. § 3C1.1. We affirm the judgment.

From August 2011 through July 2012, Brewer took out $20,000 in payday loans 

from 16 different lenders. Brewer has been married several times, and on the loan

applications, she used six different names, all variants of her given name and the 

surname of a former spouse: Jacuquelyn Walker, Jacquelyn Walker, Jacquelyn Johnson, 

Jacquelyn Walker-Johnson, and Jacqueline Livingston-Walker. On the earliest 

applications, she used one of three social security numbers assigned by the Social

Security Administration—her original number plus two replacements she obtained by 

claiming to have been the victim of identity theft. But after her employer ComEd 

promoted Brewer to the position of customer-service supervisor, she also took out 

payday loans using social security numbers she had stolen from a database of customer 

information.

ComEd investigators uncovered Brewer’s scheme when customers complained 

about receiving calls from creditors about the loans. The investigators then discovered 

that in her application for employment, Brewer had falsely denied having a felony 

conviction. In fact, she was on supervised release for mail fraud, fraudulent use of social 

security numbers, and unauthorized use of credit cards. See United States v. Brewer, 

No. IP-06-CR-0146-01 (S.D. Ind. Aug. 1, 2007). Brewer had falsely told her probation 

officer that ComEd knew about her criminal history and that she did not have access to 

customers’ information.

Brewer pleaded guilty to the indictment in this case in October 2013. In a 

memorandum filed before Brewer’s initial sentencing, her lawyer asserted that Brewer 

had been “confused” about which of the three numbers to use when applying for a loan 

with her own social security number, and thus none of these loans should count as 

relevant conduct. To substantiate this theory, counsel submitted three unauthenticated 

documents that the lawyer represented to be from the Social Security Administration. 

The document dated January 2010 states that “Mrs. Jacquelyn Walker has experienced 

fraud on her Social Security number, and at this time we are unable to give her any

proof of the Social Security Number she is allowed to use.” Yet this document says that 

Brewer’s current number ends with 1098 (the other five digits are blacked out). On the 

other hand, the document dated April 2011 instructs “Ms. Jacquelyn Walker aka 

Jacquelyn Livingston” to “only use” a number ending in 9105 pending the outcome of 

the agency’s investigation into her allegation of identity theft. And the document dated 

July 2012 appears to reverse course, declaring that “Jacqueline Walker” had been 

Case: 15-3094 Document: 38 Filed: 12/19/2016 Pages: 5
No. 15-3094 Page 3

“assigned” a number ending in 1098 (again the remaining five digits are blacked out).

All three of these documents are identified in the lower left corner as a “Form

SSA-2458,” but unlike the first two, the third one lacks the further designation of 

“EF (07-2002).”

At the initial sentencing, the government maintained that Brewer had fabricated 

at least the last of these three documents. Michael Pettus, whose surname appears on 

the document as the “service rep” who prepared it, acknowledged that he may have

met with Brewer in July 2012. But he flatly denied preparing the document, stating that 

he never would have used that form to tell a customer to use a particular social security 

number. He also pointed to irregularities showing that the document could not have 

been created with the .pdf template his office uses (and used in 2012). For example, 

some of the numbers and check marks on the form do not line up correctly with the 

boxes provided for them, some of the text is underlined (not an option the template 

provides), the document lists the addresses of two different Social Security

Administration offices, and the listed telephone number is incorrect. To highlight these 

discrepancies, the government introduced an example of how the document would look

if Pettus had used the .pdf template to create it. The government also introduced 

testimony from two managers from the Social Security Administration who 

corroborated Pettus’s testimony that the July 2012 document appears to be fabricated.

They concluded that it must have been based on an outdated version of form SSA-2458 

because it identifies the Social Security Administration as a part of the Department of 

Health and Human Services even though the agency has been independent for two 

decades. Brewer did not testify at sentencing to explain how she received the document, 

nor did she offer any other evidence.

After receiving the government’s undisputed evidence, the district court found at

that initial sentencing hearing that the government had proved by a preponderance of 

the evidence that the July 2012 document is “not genuine” and that Brewer had 

submitted it intentionally to explain why she had applied for several loans in a short 

time using all three of her social security numbers. Thus, in calculating Brewer’s offense 

level under the sentencing guidelines, the court declined to give Brewer any downward 

adjustment for acceptance of responsibility, see U.S.S.G. § 3E1.1, and instead imposed an 

upward adjustment for obstruction of justice, see § 3C1.1. The court then sentenced 

Brewer to an aggregate of 65 months’ imprisonment: 41 months for fraudulent use of a 

social security number plus the statutory minimum consecutive term of 24 months for 

aggravated identity theft.

Case: 15-3094 Document: 38 Filed: 12/19/2016 Pages: 5
No. 15-3094 Page 4

The parties’ joint motion for remand after that initial sentencing stated that 

Brewer wanted to challenge on appeal “only the district court’s imposition of certain 

conditions of supervised release.” A remand was appropriate, the parties said, because 

“the record does not establish that the district court followed the requirements of 

3583(d), including by determining that the discretionary conditions of supervised 

release imposed were reasonably related to the factors set forth in 3553(a)(1), (a)(2)(B), 

(a)(2)(C), and (a)(2)(D).” We granted the motion and remanded for resentencing “in

light of United States v. Thompson.”

On remand Brewer argued for a lower sentence based on her view of certain 

postsentencing events: (1) The Bureau of Prisons had miscalculated her release date;

(2) the BOP had failed to provide mental-health treatment; and (3) she had made an 

effort to rehabilitate herself while in custody. Brewer also devoted 12 lines of an 11-page 

resentencing memorandum to asserting that the document found by the district court to 

be fabricated in fact is legitimate. Counsel attached to the memorandum an 

unauthenticated “Visitor Information Report” that he said impeaches Pettus’s testimony 

at the initial sentencing that Pettus was “unaware of whether his office had an 

electronic version of [form] SSA 2458 in 2012.”

At Brewer’s resentencing the parties declined to present any new evidence or 

argument to support the positions they had advanced during the initial sentencing. 

Indeed, Brewer’s lawyer did not even mention the increase for obstruction of justice or 

attempt to explain the exhibit attached to Brewer’s resentencing memorandum. The

district judge thus adopted all of his prior guidelines calculations, including his decision 

to impose the increase for obstruction of justice. The judge then refined the conditions 

of supervised release to comply with Thompson and shaved five months off Brewer’s 

sentence as a reward for her postsentencing rehabilitation efforts.

In this second appeal, Brewer challenges only the finding that she obstructed 

justice by submitting a false document during the sentencing proceedings. The

government counters that Brewer waived this claim “by disavowing it on her first 

appeal.” But as we explained recently in United States v. Mobley, “a Thompson remand 

gives a district court the power to hear new evidence or arguments (or reconsider the 

same evidence and arguments) as it fashions the new sentence.” 833 F.3d 797, 802 

(7th Cir. 2016). And though after a Thompson remand a district court is not required to 

consider evidence or arguments that could have been presented during an earlier 

appeal, the district court “is required to acknowledge that it has this power and explain 

why or why not it wishes to exercise it.” Id. at 801; see United States v. Lewis, No. 16-1401,

Case: 15-3094 Document: 38 Filed: 12/19/2016 Pages: 5
No. 15-3094 Page 5

2016 WL 6777327, at *4 (7th Cir. Nov. 16, 2016) (“A remand in light of Thompson vacates 

the entire sentence, allowing the district court to alter any aspect of that sentence at 

resentencing.”).

That said, Brewer has not shown that the district judge erred in overruling her 

objection to the increase for obstruction of justice. The judge reduced her sentence by 

five months as a reward for her postsentencing efforts to reform, so he clearly was not 

“under the misapprehension that the remand was limited to the conditions of 

supervised release.” Mobley, 833 F.3d at 803. The judge also acknowledged Brewer’s 

resentencing memorandum in which she had again denied fabricating the July 2012 

form. But Brewer on remand raised no meaningful challenge to the obstruction-of-justice 

guideline, so the judge properly exercised his discretion in choosing not to revisit an 

issue that Brewer abandoned during her first appeal. See id. at 801–02.

Moreover, we review for clear error the facts underlying the district court’s 

application of § 3C1.1, United States v. Stenson, 741 F.3d 827, 831 (7th Cir. 2014), and 

Brewer has not shown that the judge clearly erred in finding that the July 2012 

document is fabricated. During the original sentencing hearing, the government 

presented testimony from three agency employees, including Pettus who allegedly 

created the document, and each explained why the document cannot be genuine. 

Brewer, on the other hand, made no effort to authenticate the document and did not 

present any evidence in rebuttal. Counsel’s speculation about the document’s 

authenticity is not evidence. See United States v. Chapman, 694 F.3d 908, 914 (7th Cir. 

2012). And the district court was not obliged to assume—despite all evidence to the 

contrary—that there is some innocent explanation for the form’s many irregularities.

AFFIRMED.

Case: 15-3094 Document: 38 Filed: 12/19/2016 Pages: 5