Opinion ID: 746455
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Faulkner

Text: 28 In 1986, Faulkner began to work as a civilian electronics engineer at CROSSBOW, an office within the Department of the Army and located at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama. His responsibilities included acting as a Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COTR) for various government contracts. As a COTR, Faulkner helped to identify the need for contractor assistance, select a qualified contractor, review estimates, monitor performance quality and timeliness, and review progress in relation to expenditures. As a COTR with the Army, he did not control contract money. 29 Faulkner enrolled in UTSI in the spring of 1987 and selected Frost as his major professor. In the middle of 1987, he began the process of writing a dissertation of the topic of False Targeting Effects of Turbulent Eddies in Millimeter Frequencies. After almost two years of effort, Faulkner completed an initial draft of the dissertation. In August or September of 1989, however, he discovered that his dissertation was relying upon classified data. After consultations with Frost and a government official, Faulkner later learned that, because the University of Tennessee had a policy prohibiting classified projects for advanced degrees, he had to select a new topic and begin working on another dissertation. 30 On November 30, 1987, Joe Durham, the immediate supervisor of Faulkner at CROSSBOW, responded to a proposal from FWG by issuing a letter indicating that CROSSBOW intended to contract with FWG to analyze classified threat simulator radar systems. This proposed contract eventually would become the Miscellaneous Defense Activities (MDA) contract. Although Faulkner did not select FWG for the contract or participate in the negotiations process, he did prepare sometime in 1988 a memorandum which justified the granting of a sole-source, as opposed to a bid or competitive, contract to FWG. Within the memorandum, Faulkner referred to an informal market survey which he had conducted earlier that year. Faulkner stated in the memorandum that defense contractors other than FWG were unsuitable to perform the MDA contract because they would not sign a hardware waiver. It is undisputed that formal or written market surveys were not required for government contracts worth under a million dollars, such as the MDA contract. Further, Durham testified that competitive defense contracts may pose security risks because they involve the exposure of classified information, and that CROSSBOW did not maintain a single competitive contract during his tenure as a supervisor from 1985 to 1993. 31 On January 31, 1989, CROSSBOW issued a sole-source letter contract providing that FWG would perform the MDA contract from the date of the letter until July, 1990 in return for $937,248. Faulkner acted as the COTR for the MDA contract during this time. 32 In the fall of 1989, and shortly after Faulkner learned that he could not complete his first dissertation topic, Frost gave Faulkner three unpublished reports completed by FWG in the mid-1980s and instructed him to produce a new dissertation by combining them. Faulkner completed a rough draft of his new dissertation in early 1990, and a final draft in mid-March of 1990. Faulkner sent copies of the final draft to Frost and the other four members of the academic committee before which Faulkner would defend his dissertation. During his oral defense in late March of 1990, Faulkner told the committee that his topic was substantially related to his previous topic and was based upon three FWG studies in which Frost had participated. After Faulkner made the changes suggested by committee members, the committee approved his dissertation and he graduated with a doctor in philosophy degree. 33 The government introduced evidence that at least ninety-two percent of Faulkner's second dissertation was plagiarized from the three FWG reports given to him by Frost, and from a conference paper presented by Frost. Although many pages, including the conclusion, represented verbatim excerpts from the FWG reports, they did not contain quotation marks or any citations to the reports. 34 Frost gave the dissertation to his secretary at FWG, Martha Craddock, to type. Craddock, who spent about three months working occasionally on the project, testified that part of [typing the dissertation] was cut and paste and pages from other documents that were cut and rearranged and reworded, and that she recognized some of the dissertation as reports she previously had typed. 35 As noted, the prosecution alleges that Faulkner committed mail fraud by participating in a scheme to defraud the government by helping to procure the MDA contract for FWG in return for a free dissertation. The mailings upon which the degree-for-contract convictions of Faulkner are based are vouchers for the MDA contract mailed from FWG to the government on January 15, February 12, and March 15, 1990. The prosecution cites the testimony of David Baker, an Army policeman, who stated that Faulkner told him during the investigation of these matters that Faulkner never had contacted any companies when conducting his market survey in 1988, but instead had concluded on the basis of his personal knowledge of the industry that contractors other than FWG would be unwilling to sign a hardware waiver. Baker therefore concluded that the 1988 memorandum compiled by Faulkner was false, because when you say a company will not sign [a waiver], that means that you have ... talked to somebody that can speak for that company. You can't just, you know, make that decision for the company. Contrary to the opinion of Baker, however, significant evidence indicates that CROSSBOW frequently did not contact other companies directly when conducting informal market surveys for contracts worth less than one million dollars if the contracts involved classified material. 36 Regardless of whether it was improper not to contact other companies directly, or whether Faulkner falsely suggested that he had done otherwise, these convictions lack an evidentiary basis simply because Faulkner performed and memorialized the market survey in 1988. From 1987 until 1989, however, he was working on his first dissertation, and there is no dispute that he was the only person to work on that dissertation, or that the scheme to concoct a second plagiarized dissertation did not arise until the fall of 1989. The record therefore fails to contain sufficient proof that Faulkner, with the intent to defraud the government, performed and relied upon an improper market survey in order to reward Frost and Turner for bestowing an illegitimate dissertation. 37 The prosecution presents an alternative argument. The MDA contract was extended twice: it received an initial extension from July, 1990 to September, 1990, and then again was extended until September, 1991. These extensions raised the total value of the contract to $1,896,501.29. The prosecution asserts that documents entitled program identification documents submitted by CROSSBOW employees on March 16 and April 3, 1990 led to these extensions. The prosecution attempts to link Faulkner with the first of these documents, arguing that even as Faulkner was cutting and pasting Frost's reports together for his dissertation, he was recommending in March 1990 that FWG get an extension on the contract. 1 38 Although the evidence does indicate that Faulkner was passing off a plagiarized dissertation with the help of Frost in March, 1990, it does not suggest that Faulkner was responsible for extending the MDA contract. Lawrence Duncan, who works for a support organization for the Department of Defense and who served as a contracting officer for the MDA contract until mid-1990, testified for the prosecution. His direct testimony established only that somebody asked to extend the MDA contract in March, 1990, and that Faulkner was the COTR for the MDA contract at that time. The prosecution argues that this testimony during redirect examination shows that Faulkner instigated the extension: 39 Q. Okay. But when that extension was requested in March of 1990, the COTR at that time getting the ball rolling to get that extension started was Dennis Faulkner, wasn't it? 40 A. Yes, sir. 41 Examination of this exchange and the testimony preceding it reveals that Duncan reaffirmed that Faulkner was the COTR for the MDA contract when an extension was requested. The only material in the record suggesting that Faulkner got the ball rolling on the extension was the question posed by the prosecution. The fact that the prosecution attempts to rely solely upon evidence created through the phrasing of its own question is highlighted by the fact that Duncan testified during cross-examination that three specific individuals other than Faulkner prepared and signed the March, 1990 program identification document. Duncan further testified that another COTR, Ken McCormick, performed the technical evaluation for the proposed extension, and that the contracting officer who replaced Duncan on the MDA contract, Michael Corbis, proceeded to do the work on the major contract extension, which was issued by him on the 28th of September of 1990. The record does not support the assertion that the status of Faulkner as a COTR, standing alone, allows for the inference that he recommended an extension. 42 Because the record provides insufficient evidence for Faulkner's convictions for Counts Thirteen, Fourteen, and Sixteen, we do not address the claim by Faulkner that we must reverse these convictions because the prosecution failed to disclose that a government officer who oversaw the MDA contract informed the prosecution that Faulkner had no role in extending the contract. See infra Section IV.A, discussing Brady claim raised by Frost. Because the prosecution's case against Frost and Turner on these counts is based solely upon the acts of Faulkner, there is insufficient evidence to support their convictions of Counts Thirteen, Fourteen, and Sixteen.