Opinion ID: 173656
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The district court's denial of Bacon's acceptance-of-responsibility reduction

Text: Bacon's primary argument on appeal is that the district court erred in denying his request for an acceptance-of-responsibility reduction under the Guidelines. In order to merit this reduction, Bacon bore the burden of proving his acceptance of responsibility by a preponderance of the evidence. See United States v. Roberts, 243 F.3d 235, 241 (6th Cir.2001). According to the commentary to the applicable guideline, Bacon's entitlement to an acceptance-of-responsibility reduction depended on his truthfully admitting the conduct comprising the offense(s) of conviction, and truthfully admitting or not falsely denying any additional relevant conduct for which [he] is accountable under § 1B1.3 (Relevant Conduct). See U.S.S.G. § 3E1.1 cmt. n. 1(a). This same commentary explains that a defendant who falsely denies, or frivolously contests, relevant conduct that the court determines to be true has acted in a manner inconsistent with acceptance of responsibility. Id. At his plea hearing, Bacon appeared to accept responsibility for the crime of bank fraud. But in the months between his plea and the sentencing hearing, he drafted and submitted a letter to the U.S. Probation Office that portrayed himself as a victim, not as a person who recognized that he had committed a criminal act. The letter stated that, after he had submitted various fraudulent loan applications, he learned that the process of which I was guided was improper. This claim is disingenuous because Bacon had previously admitted at his plea hearing that his loan applications contained information that he knew was false when he submitted them. Bacon's knowledge of the falsity, in other words, was not acquired later; he knew it at the time. His letter also claimed that he simply submitted a blank loan application that he unwisely allowed Tran to fill in, and that he was betrayed by Tran. The letter therefore never acknowledged that Bacon knowingly submitted false information to the credit union. Even Bacon's brief concedes that the letter puts way too much emphasis on Mr. Tran and too little emphasis on [Bacon's] own criminal acts. Furthermore, Bacon continued to lie about certain details of his fraud in the letter. The letter stated, for example, that when he applied for the loans at issue, he was employed as the manager of a small store and had been promised a salary of $52,000. But the PSR reports that Bacon never worked at this store and, at oral argument, Bacon's counsel admitted that the PSR was correct on this point. Moreover, the owner of the store stated that the employment-verification letter that Bacon had submitted as part of his loan application was a forgery. And the felony information to which Bacon pled guilty charged him with giving the credit union a false employment verification document, i.e., the forged employment-verification letter. But in Bacon's letter to the Probation Office, he claimed that this suspect letter was signed by the current owner of the store. In addition, Bacon made equivocal statements at sentencing that further indicated his failure to accept responsibility for his actions. He told the district court, for example, that, [a]s soon as I learned I had done something wrong, I absolutely took responsibility. But Bacon must have known that applying for loans using false information was wrong when he did it. Bacon also attempted to minimize his participation in the offense by telling the court that [m]y role in this was simply using my name, using my signature. And Bacon made these statements after the district court stated that it had reservations about the acceptance-of-responsibility reduction. Bacon thus knew that the court was skeptical about his acceptance of responsibility, and he had the opportunity to make clear that he was admitting his culpability. But he chose not to take advantage of that opportunity. Given this equivocation at sentencing and the statements in Bacon's post-plea letter that repeated falsehoods and blamed others for the fraud, the district court's rejection of Bacon's request for an acceptance-of-responsibility reduction was not clearly erroneous. See U.S.S.G. § 3E1.1 cmt. n. 1(a) (explaining that a defendant who falsely denies, or frivolously contests, relevant conduct that the court determines to be true has acted in a manner inconsistent with acceptance of responsibility); see also United States v. Wilson, 239 Fed. Appx. 260, 267 (6th Cir.2007) (upholding a district court's denial of a request for an acceptance-of-responsibility reduction because of the defendant's evasive and illogical description of his criminal activity).