Opinion ID: 205321
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Amount Ordered in the Judgment

Text: Despite the government's contention on appeal that the amended Judgment requires Pescatore to pay no more in restitution than $2,559,611.79, nothing in the recordpertinent parts of which are quoted in Part I.B. abovesupports that contention. To begin with, the record does not include any document ordering Pescatore to pay any amount other than $3,000,000 or any order or opinion stating that the $3 million amount originally ordered has been reduced. Further, the government's letter to the district court, requesting that the original judgment be corrected, did not ask the court to change the restitution ordered to a sum other than $3 million; it asked only that the court amend the judgment by attaching the PSR pages that identified the victims and itemized their lossesand it stated that the reason for the request was that the DOJ required that the judgment specifically identify the victims in order to process the restoration request. (Government's January 2009 Letter at 1.). Nothing in that letter stated that $3 million was the wrong amount. Nor was a lesser total amount immediately apparent from the proffered PSR pages. While the Loss Chart detailed the losses suffered by each of 80 victims, it did not state a total. From the government's submission, the district court might easily have inferred that the Loss Chart supported the entire already-ordered $3 million. Indeed, the Government's January 2009 Letter described the requested amendment as a clerical correction ( id. at 2), hardly a term that is applicable to an undiscussed reduction of a liability by nearly half a million dollars. In sum, neither the letter nor the attached PSR pages alerted the court that the Judgment as thus augmented might be viewed as reducing Pescatore's restitution obligation from $3 million to $2,559,611.79. Moreover, such a view was nowhere evident in the government's opposition to Pescatore's November 2009 request to have the ordered $3 million reduced to match the amount of his victims' losses. The government's preargument letter to the district court stated, inter alia, that [t]he Court's order of mandatory restitution in the amount of $3 million is consistent with the Mandatory Victim[s] Restitution Act. (Government's December 2009 Letter at 2.) The letter contained no reference to $2,559,611.79. Nor at oral argument was there any mention of that number. AUSA Hennigan stated that based on the PSR pages incorporated in the Judgment, she calculated the victims' losses to be about $2.7 million (Motion Tr. 11); but that statement apparently was not meant to suggest that any less than $3 million was ordered in the Judgment, for she had referred to the possibility that there might be an overpayment ( id. at 9), and when the court asked whether the Judgment ordered payment of $3 million, Hennigan answered affirmatively ( id. at 21). AUSA Gatz echoed that affirmative answer ( see id. ); and she argued unequivocally that Pescatore had agreed to pay $3 million in restitution and no less, that the court had ordered that amount in the J & C, and that Pescatore's attempt to have that amount reduced was improper ( id. at 14). Finally, as revealed by the colloquy described in Part I.B. above, the district court itself plainly did not believe it had amended the judgment to reduce the restitution amount below $3 million. ( See, e.g., id. at 21 (The Court: Wasn't my order for $3 million? . . . . That is the judgment.).) The record thus in no way supports the government's new contention that, because the judgment was amended to append the PSR Loss Chart listing Pescatore's victims and their losses, that clerical step reduced Pescatore's restitution obligation to $2,559,611.79. The Judgment orders Pescatore to pay restitution of $3 million. The government's present acknowledgement that, as revealed by the pertinent PSR pages, [a]ll the losses sustained by the victims of crimes in which Pescatore was involved add up to $2,559,611.79 (Government brief on appeal at 17 (footnote omitted)) means that those losses total some $440,000 less than the Judgment orders Pescatore to pay. Pescatore contends that the discrepancy is even greater, arguing that the actual losses listed in the PSR Loss Chart total at least $1 million less than $3 million. (Pescatore brief on appeal at 8 (emphasis in original).) We address these two discrepanciesthe first actual, the second allegedin reverse order.