Opinion ID: 783918
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Scope of Fraud and Loss

Text: 30 As a further challenge to the order of restitution, appellant takes issue with the district court's findings on the scope of fraud and loss attributable to him. He insists the amount of restitution should have been limited either to the amount of his civil settlement or, in the alternative, to that amount plus the amounts paid to medical providers for his treatment. Appellant also believes the trial court should have ordered that his liability be made joint and several with his co-defendant and with the medical care providers who received the no-fault reimbursements. 31 As already noted, appellant's restitution order is governed by the MVRA as codified in 18 U.S.C. §§ 3663A and 3664. Section 3664(h) instructs that 32 [i]f the court finds that more than 1 defendant has contributed to the loss of a victim, the court may make each defendant liable for payment of the full amount of restitution or may apportion liability among the defendants to reflect the level of contribution to the victim's loss and economic circumstances of each defendant. 33 18 U.S.C. § 3664(h). 34 Under the express terms of § 3664, Baptiste's arguments are without merit. First, the district court found that Baptiste participated in a jointly undertaken criminal activity and that the fraudulent medical expenses and civil settlements of each passenger were foreseeable by the other passengers in the vehicle. Because all of the passengers contributed jointly to the loss of each victim, it was not an abuse of discretion for the district court to find both Yves Baptiste and Violette Beaubrun — another convicted passenger involved in the same staged accident — liable for payment of the full amount of loss occasioned by the accident ($46,701). Second, with respect to Baptiste's contention that his liability for restitution should be imposed jointly and severally, we observe that he and his co-defendant Beaubrun were assessed restitution in identical amounts and, although the district court was not explicit, the government concedes and we conclude that the district court intended Baptiste and Beaubrun to be held jointly and severally liable for this loss. Finally, Baptiste's argument that the restitution liability should have been joint and several with the medical care providers who received the no-fault reimbursements is clearly meritless, as those entities were not charged in the indictment or tried with these defendants and the trial court therefore lacked authority to subject them to a restitution order. III Appellant Dormetis' Appeal A. Loss Calculation 35 We turn now to Guerline Dormetis' appeal. First, she challenges the scope of fraud attributed to her by the district court at sentencing. In calculating the scope of the defendant's loss, it settled on a figure of $115,693.27. It included in the total loss calculation the amounts attributable to Dormetis as well as amounts attributable to other passengers who rode in the same deliberately crashed car. This aggregation of loss amounts was significant because under the 1997 Sentencing Guidelines used to calculate Dormetis' sentence, the amount of loss attributed to her resulted in as much as a three-level enhancement of her base offense level. See U.S.S.G. § 2F1.1(b) (1997). Appellant now contends it was error for the district court to include in the calculation amounts attributable to the other car occupants. We review a district court's interpretation of the Sentencing Guidelines de novo, its findings of fact for clear error, and its application of the Guidelines to the facts for abuse of discretion. United States v. Kang, 225 F.3d 260, 261-62 (2d Cir.2000) (per curiam). 36 Under the Guidelines applicable to Dormetis' sentence, a criminal defendant's offense level is determined not only by her own acts, but also by all the acts and omissions of others whom the defendant aided and abetted, or, in the case of a jointly undertaken criminal activity ... all reasonably foreseeable acts and omissions of others in furtherance of the jointly undertaken criminal activity. U.S.S.G. § 1B1.3(a)(1) (1997). Judge Gleeson found appellant aided and abetted in the other occupants' fraud and that the others' fraudulent claims were reasonably foreseeable consequences of the jointly undertaken criminal activity. We perceive no error of law or fact, nor an abuse of discretion, in these conclusions. B. Risk of Serious Bodily Injury Enhancement 37 Additionally, Dormetis contests the district court's enhancement of her total offense level during sentencing. In determining Dormetis' total offense level, her base offense level was enhanced by two levels, pursuant to § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A) of the 1997 version of the United States Sentencing Guidelines, which applied to Dormetis' sentencing. See U.S.S.G. § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A) (1997). This provision of the Guidelines directs that, with respect to offenses involving fraud or deceit, the offense level should be increased by two if the offense involved the conscious or reckless risk of serious bodily injury. See id. This sentence enhancement provision codified at § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A) in the 1997 Sentencing Guidelines is now codified at § 2B1.1(b)(11)(A). 38 Dormetis contests the decision to adjust her offense level on the basis of this enhancement, arguing that while the Guidelines require a specific finding that she was conscious of or in reckless disregard of a risk of serious bodily injury, the district court expressly found that she was not aware of the dangerousness of her conduct. 39 In protesting the district court's application of the offense level enhancement to her offense, Dormetis makes much of that court's comment that it did not mean to suggest that Dormetis was necessarily aware that she was putting her health and life at risk or that she knowingly put life and limb at risk. Judge Gleeson added that [m]ore often than not she thought she could get into a fender bender and make money. Appellant believes these statements mean the district court found that she did not act while conscious of, or in reckless disregard of, a risk of serious bodily injury and that the enhancement is thus improper in her case. 40 Appellant's insistence that the above statements somehow invalidate the application of the enhancement is unavailing. Not every utterance of a district court may be construed by a reviewing court as a finding of fact and all utterances should be interpreted in light of the circumstances before the court. In the case at hand, the relatively equivocal statements Dormetis points to were made by the district judge as an aside during a discussion of an unrelated motion for a downward departure, and thus we do not deem the comments to constitute relevant findings of fact. Further, the remarks when placed in context seem simply to refer to the degree to which Dormetis thought that her own safety was at risk as a result of her participation in the deliberately caused accident, and not to the degree to which she understood that drivers and passengers in other vehicles may have been imperiled. On the latter point, the district court did make findings, which could not be clearer. Noting that the driver of another car in one deliberately caused accident ended up in the opposite lane facing oncoming traffic, the district judge stated that [t]he risk of bodily injury inheres in any deliberately caused accident and found that the risk of bodily injury is patent in this type of criminal activity. In addition, as we explain below, whether or not appellant was herself mindful of the dangerousness of her conduct, she is nonetheless subject to the enhancement because her conduct was reckless. 41 We observe that there has been some disagreement among our sister Circuits regarding the proper construction of the Guidelines requirement that an offense involve conscious or reckless risk of serious bodily injury. The Eighth Circuit, on the one hand, has appeared to distinguish between a conscious risk and a reckless risk by holding that an offense involves a conscious risk when the defendant is aware of the risk but consciously disregards it, whereas a reckless risk is one that the defendant recklessly disregards despite his awareness of the risk. See United States v. McCord, Inc., 143 F.3d 1095, 1098 (8th Cir.1998). The Ninth Circuit has resisted this analysis for several reasons. First, the Ninth Circuit has pointed out that, if an offense that involves a reckless risk of injury requires an awareness of the risk, there is no meaningful distinction between a reckless risk and a conscious risk as the terms are used in the Guidelines. See United States v. Johansson, 249 F.3d 848, 858 (9th Cir.2001) (The use of the disjunctive conjunction `or' between `conscious' and `reckless' ... suggests that a conscious risk of injury is something different from and an alternative to a reckless risk of injury.). The Ninth Circuit has also pointed out that the Guidelines describe a reckless risk, and not the reckless disregard of a known risk. See id. at 858-59 & n. 4. Finally, the Ninth Circuit has pointed out a flaw that results from the Eighth Circuit's framework, namely, that a defendant can escape the application of the enhancement by claiming that he was not aware that his conduct created a serious risk. See id. 42 We are persuaded that the approach taken by the Ninth Circuit, including its conclusion that a defendant does not have to subjectively know that his or her conduct created a serious bodily risk, is correct. Accordingly, we read the Sentencing Guidelines to say that, in order for the 1997 § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A) enhancement to apply, a defendant's fraudulent conduct must have created a risk that others would suffer serious bodily injury; moreover, said risk must have either been known to the defendant (conscious), or, if unknown to the defendant, the type of risk that is obvious to a reasonable person and for which disregard of said risk represents a gross deviation from what a reasonable person would do (reckless). See id. 43 In the case at bar, appellant is subject to the offense level enhancement of § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A), whether or not she intended or subjectively understood the risk of serious bodily injury, because it is beyond cavil that her conduct was reckless. See United States v. Hoffman, 9 F.3d 49, 50 (8th Cir.1993) (per curiam) (upholding application of § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A) adjustment in a nearly identical case where the defendant deliberately caused accidents, feigned injuries and submitted fraudulent medical bills). The jury found that Dormetis intended to participate in a staged, deliberate auto accident, and the district court further found that the serious risk of bodily injury was inherent to this type of criminal activity. As a consequence, it was not an abuse of the district court's discretion to enhance by two her offense level pursuant to § 2F1.1(b)(4)(A).