In the 

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ 

No. 18-1313 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 

Plaintiff-Appellee, 

v.

EVELYN JOHNSON, 

Defendant-Appellant. 

____________________ 

Appeal from the United States District Court 

for the Southern District of Illinois. 

No. 15-CR-30152-NJR-01 — Nancy J. Rosenstengel, Judge. 

____________________ 

ARGUED OCTOBER 31, 2018 — DECIDED DECEMBER 21, 2018 

____________________ 

Before FLAUM, EASTERBROOK, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges. 

EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. After pleading guilty to preparing false tax returns for her clients, 26 U.S.C. §7206(2), 

Evelyn Johnson was sentenced to 18 months in prison, to be 

followed by one year’s supervised release. The judgment includes $79,325 in restitution—the amount that Johnson’s clients unlawfully avoided paying (with respect to the counts 
2 No. 18-1313 

of conviction) that had not been collected from the taxpayers 

before sentencing. Johnson does not contest her convictions 

or the length of her sentences. But she says that the prosecution should have told the judge how much more it might collect from her clients, which could affect how much she owes 

in restitution. 

Johnson contends that the amount received from the taxpayers is exculpatory material that should have been revealed under Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963). Yet the 

collections were not concealed. The presentence report 

showed the court and Johnson that the United States already 

had collected substantial sums (the original loss figure exceeded $150,000) and was trying to obtain from taxpayers 

the rest of what they should have paid in the first place. 

Johnson was free to ask how much more had been collected 

by the date of sentencing but did not do so. Brady does not 

apply when information is available for the asking. See, e.g., 

United States v. Morris, 80 F.3d 1151, 1170 (7th Cir. 1996); 

United States v. Wilson, 901 F.2d 378, 380 (4th Cir. 1990). 

The restitution statute, not the Constitution, determines 

the prosecution’s duty—and the duty is one of credit against 

the judgment, not of disclosure during the sentencing hearing. The $79,325 figure reflects taxes still outstanding because of Johnson’s fraud. But the parties disagree about 

whether tax collections are credited against that award. 

The United States contends that 18 U.S.C. §3664(f)(1)(B) 

entitles it to collect the full $79,325 from Johnson and to keep 

whatever it receives from the taxpayers—and this despite 

the norm against double recovery. See Paroline v. United 

States, 572 U.S. 434 (2014); Restatement (Second) of Torts

§885(3) (1979). If collections from taxpayers don’t affect the 
No. 18-1313 3 

restitution obligation, there’s no need to disclose the collections to Johnson, let alone credit them against the award. But 

that’s not what §3664(f)(1)(B) says. It provides: 

In no case shall the fact that a victim has received or is entitled to 

receive compensation with respect to a loss from insurance or 

any other source be considered in determining the amount of 

restitution. 

This is a statutory version of the collateral-source doctrine, 

familiar in tort law. See Restatement (Second) of Torts

§920A(2). It deals with setting the base amount of restitution, 

United States v. Malone, 747 F.3d 481, 488 (7th Cir. 2014), not 

with how collections from joint wrongdoers are credited. 

(The taxpayers are culpable for signing and filing the false 

returns that Johnson prepared.) 

The United States’ interpretation would bring 

§3664(f)(1)(B) into conflict with §3664(j), which does deal 

with credits for third-party collections: 

(1) If a victim has received compensation from insurance or any 

other source with respect to a loss, the court shall order that restitution be paid to the person who provided or is obligated to 

provide the compensation, but the restitution order shall provide 

that all restitution of victims required by the order be paid to the 

victims before any restitution is paid to such a provider of compensation. 

(2) Any amount paid to a victim under an order of restitution 

shall be reduced by any amount later recovered as compensatory 

damages for the same loss by the victim in— 

(A) any Federal civil proceeding; and 

(B) any State civil proceeding, to the extent provided by the 

law of the State. 

Section 3664(j)(1) completes the picture with respect to insurance and similar payments: these do not reduce the 
4 No. 18-1313 

amount of the restitution award (per §3664(f)(1)(B)), and the 

wrongdoer must reimburse the source of those benefits. Section 3664(j)(2) covers “compensatory damages”, which reduce the amount the wrongdoer pays in restitution. This is 

the standard joint-and-several-liability approach of tort law, 

which applies to collections under §3664 too. Victims get just 

a single recovery. And since Johnson will receive credit 

against the restitution award for whatever the United States 

collects from the taxpayers, it was unnecessary to disclose 

the details of collection activities before the district judge determined the base restitution award. 

Perhaps one could doubt that the collection of back taxes 

counts as “compensatory damages” under §3664(j)(2), but 

neither party to this appeal has taken issue with cases holding that tax collections must be credited against restitution 

awards in criminal prosecutions. Indeed, courts see this as 

such an easy question that they have treated the issue in 

non-precedential decisions. See United States v. Smith, 398 

Fed. App’x 938, 941–42 (4th Cir. 2010); United States v. Holland, 141 Fed. App’x 589, 591 (9th Cir. 2005); United States v. 

Kerekes, 2012 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 115280 at *12 (S.D. N.Y. Aug. 15, 

2012); Rozin v. CIR, T.C. Memo 2017-52 (Mar. 29, 2017). Two 

courts of appeals have come to the same result without discussing §3664(j)(2). See United States v. Tucker, 217 F.3d 960, 

962 (8th Cir. 2000); United States v. Helmsley, 941 F.2d 71, 102 

(2d Cir. 1991). And it does not seem to us a stretch to apply 

the label “damages” to collections of taxes wrongly unpaid 

as a result of criminal fraud. 

All remaining issues concern the terms of Johnson’s supervised release. Before sentencing she signed a waiver of 

her right to have these conditions read aloud, and she now 
No. 18-1313 5 

contends that this violated the Due Process Clause of the 

Fifth Amendment. But why? The proposed terms and conditions were included in the presentence report, which Johnson had seen. The court offered her a choice: Have these 

conditions read aloud as part of the sentencing or forego this 

right. She chose to forego it, deeming the writing adequate. 

We’ve recommended that district judges give defendants 

this very choice. See, e.g., United States v. Bloch, 825 F.3d 862, 

872 (7th Cir. 2016). Defendants are entitled to waive their 

rights and do so routinely as part of guilty pleas or stipulations. Johnson does not point to anything that made this 

waiver involuntary. The court did not say or imply that 

Johnson would suffer in any way (other than boredom) if 

she demanded that the lengthy conditions be read verbatim 

at sentencing. Having made a free choice, she is bound by 

her decision and cannot now complain that the court did not 

read these conditions aloud. 

In addition to waiving the reading of these conditions, 

Johnson also elected not to contest the substance of any. On 

appeal, however, she objects to five of them. Her failure to 

raise any of these objections in the district court limits our 

review to plain error. United States v. Poulin, 809 F.3d 924, 

930 (7th Cir. 2016); Bloch, 825 F.3d at 869. And we don’t see 

any error, let alone plain error. We give just two examples. 

One contested condition reads: “The defendant shall not 

knowingly leave the judicial district without the permission 

of the Court or the probation officer.” Johnson calls this 

vague, but it isn’t. “Judicial district” is a statutory term. Anyone can look up the boundaries of this district, see 28 U.S.C. 

§93(c), and a person unable or unwilling to do that could 

look at the presentence report, which lists all counties in the 
6 No. 18-1313 

district. What’s more, the word “knowingly” in this condition cures any potential vagueness. See Screws v. United 

States, 325 U.S. 91, 102 (1945). If Johnson strays outside the 

district by accident, she has not violated this condition. 

Instead of dealing directly with the language of this condition, Johnson relies on United States v. Ortiz, 817 F.3d 553, 

555 (7th Cir. 2016), which found excessive vagueness in a 

condition requiring the defendant to remain “within the jurisdiction” where he was being supervised. “The jurisdiction” does not have a statutory definition. It could mean 

anything from the city in which the probation office is located to the judicial district to the limits of the court’s subpoena 

power (generally the district plus 100 miles) to the boundaries of the Seventh Circuit (Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) 

to the United States as a whole. Ortiz insisted that district 

judges give better notice. The reference to “the judicial district” was the result; it supplies the degree of specificity 

missing from “the jurisdiction”; adding “knowingly” makes 

things doubly safe for defendants. The language in Johnson’s case is exactly the sort of condition we have been urging district courts to employ. 

Another contested condition reads: “The defendant shall 

respond to all inquiries of the probation officer and follow 

all reasonable instructions of the probation officer.” The first 

part of this condition comes straight from a statute, 18 U.S.C. 

§3563(b)(17), but Johnson asserts that the word “reasonable” 

makes the second part excessively vague. We do not see 

how. “Reasonable” is one of those protean words that resists 

specification. It is ubiquitous in statutes and regulations, designed for the protection of people who otherwise would be 

beset by petty bureaucratic demands. Thomas v. Chicago Park 
No. 18-1313 7 

District, 534 U.S. 316, 324 (2002), holds that this word is permissible even in situations governed by the First Amendment; it is certainly permissible in a criminal judgment. 

Would Johnson think herself better off if the word were 

deleted and she were obliged to do whatever the probation 

officer said, however silly or obnoxious that command might 

be? Does she want to face revocation of supervised release 

for failing to stand on her head when commanded to do so, 

or hoot like an owl in a restaurant? Johnson likely wants an 

elaborate definition, rather than deletion of this protection, 

but the history of tort law shows that any effort to define 

“reasonable” is a fool’s errand. In United States v. Kappes, 782 

F.3d 828, 860–62 (7th Cir. 2015), we recommended that district judges add the word “reasonable” to another condition 

(the one requiring defendants to submit to searches), so that 

probation officers could not intrude without justification into 

personal lives. Having deemed the word “reasonable” the 

solution to a problem in Kappes, we are hardly going to declare now that the word must be removed from all conditions of supervised release. 

Johnson’s remaining objections do not require separate 

discussion. 

AFFIRMED