Opinion ID: 613898
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: 100 or More Documents

Text: Archer received a nine-level enhancement for an offense involving 100 or more fraudulent documents. See U.S. Sentencing Guidelines Manual (U.S.S.G.) § 2L2.1(b)(2)(C). At sentencing, the government proffered nothing beyond what it offered at trial. And there, the only evidence as to the number of false documents involved was immigration officer Shatzkamer's statistical summary of 175 of Archer's cases. See PSR ¶ 6. To sustain quantity-based enhancements for relevant conduct, the court must base its findings on specific evidence that the offense involved the requisite quantity of items. This evidence can, however, be circumstantial. United States v. Shonubi (Shonubi II), 103 F.3d 1085, 1090 (2d Cir.1997). This requirement has two parts: (a) there must be evidence regarding the quantity of illicit or fraudulent goods and (b) it has to be specific to the defendant. See id.; United States v. Shonubi (Shonubi I), 998 F.2d 84, 89 (2d Cir.1993). Shonubi I and Shonubi II each dealt with one of these two prongs, respectively. Over a number of years, the defendant in the Shonubi cases made eight trips to Nigeria. On returning to the United States from the last of these trips, he was arrested because officials found 427.4 grams of heroin in him. Shonubi I, 998 F.2d at 86, 89. The district court, multiplying the amount found in the defendant on this one trip by the total number of trips he had made, sentenced him based on eight times that quantity. This court vacated and remanded. We explained that specific evidence e.g., drug records, admissions or live testimony[is required] to calculate ... quantities for sentencing purposes, and we concluded that the government instead provided only speculation. Id. at 89-90. On remand, the district court held an elaborate hearing, collecting a great deal of statistical evidence about the amount of heroin carried by other Nigerian smugglers in similar circumstances. Shonubi II, 103 F.3d at 1088. It then re-imposed the same sentence. Id. This court again vacated the sentence. Id. at 1093. This time, we faulted the district court for not evaluating evidence specific to the individual defendant. Id. at 1090 (By mentioning `drug records' and `admissions' as examples of specific evidence we thought it reasonably clear that we were referring to the defendant his admissions and records of his drug transactions. And by `live testimony' we were referring to testimony about his drug transactions.). In so vacating, our court was careful to point out that specific evidence need not be direct and, when correctly considered, circumstantial evidence could be sufficient. Id. For example, the court approved of statistical extrapolation to arrive at an estimate of drug quantity when the sample was randomly selected from a known population. Id. at 1092 (approving of the method of testing four randomly selected heroin balloons to estimate the quantity of heroin contained in 103 balloons found inside the defendant's body). Unlike most of the cases that follow the Shonubi decisions, the case before us does not involve the second prong of the test; there is no doubt that the evidence presented is specific to the defendant. Cf., e.g., United States v. Jones, 531 F.3d 163, 175-77 (2d Cir.2008); United States v. Moreno, 181 F.3d 206, 214 n. 3 (2d Cir. 1999). No one disputes that Archer filed all 175 I-687 applications at issue. Any analysis of those applications is, therefore, sufficiently specific to Archer. What is at issue here is whether the statistics the government relied on satisfy the first prongthe specific evidence requirement. The government contends that Shatzkamer's report, which demonstrates striking similarities between the four applications presented at trial, all of which the jury, in convicting Archer on the substantive counts, must have found to be false, and the remaining 171, constitutes adequate specific evidence. These statistics, the government asserts, permit a sentencing judge to find by a preponderance of the evidence (the relevant standard under Zagari ) that at least 96 of those applications were fraudulent, thus supporting the nine-level enhancement under § 2L2.1(b)(2)(C) for an offense involving 100 or more fraudulent documents. The contention fails for two reasons. The first and most obvious flaw in the government's reasoning is that it has presented no evidence that the four applications proven false at trial were, in Shonubi 's relevant way, a representative slice of the 175 applications on which the government relies. Unlike the representative sampling of heroin balloons in Shonubi, the four applications presented at trial were not randomly selected from the population. If they had been, Shatzkamer's report might well be sufficient. If fewer than 100 of the 175 applications were false, the likelihood of randomly selecting four applications that were all false would be, at most, 10 percent. [6] It follows then that if four randomly selected applications were all found to be false, this finding could form the basis of a reasonable conclusion that, more likely than not, at least 100 of the applications from which the four were drawn were false. Cf. United States v. Duong-Cam Tran, 519 F.3d 98, 106-07 (2d Cir.2008) (affirming random representative sampling as a valid method of estimating drug quantity). There is, instead, good reason to think that the applications presented at trial were not random, but were instead the most egregious cases. They look like the easiest ones for agents to identify as fraudulent, both because the clients who were most badly misrepresented were most likely to complain and because those applications involved assertions that were easiest to prove false. In this respect, what happened here would be as if the chemist mentioned in Shonubi had selected the four balloons with the most pungent vinegar smell, which indicates heroin, tested the chemical composition of those four and then extrapolated the result to the population of 103 balloons whose odor was less pungent. The second flaw is that the government's statistics, without more, tell us very little that is helpful to determining whether any of the other 171 applications were false. The government notes that 100 percent of the applications involved aliens who claimed to have entered the country illegally, that 96 percent of these aliens allegedly did so in 1981, that 90 percent of the applications claimed travel outside the country between June and October 1987, and that 26 percent involved one or more fill-in-the-blank affidavits. That information is interesting, but without a baseline as to what the national pool of I-687 applications (filed by, we must assume, honest lawyers) looked like to compare it toand Shatzkamer admitted he had no such baselinethe data tell us nothing about the truth or falsity of the applications. It is like saying that Dr. Jones's patients died, on average, a year after their initial visit with her: if most of her patients were healthy people coming for a check-up, this information suggests a finding that Dr. Jones is a terrible physician; if, on the other hand, Dr. Jones is an oncologist, all of whose patients had terminal cancer of a sort that had a national average life expectancy of two months, the same information makes her look very good indeed. Context is essential; but the government did not take the time and make the effort to provide any. This deficiency might, nonetheless, have been cured if the government had explained why the similarities in the applications are, in themselves, incriminating. And we certainly do not foreclose the possibility that, in some circumstances, the incriminating character of similarities is sufficiently obvious that no further explanation is needed. For example, in an immigration fraud case in which the government offered an INS agent's summary of regular patterns contained in 1365 applications filed by the defendants, the similaritiesnamely repeated stories of allegedly personal persecution, given in great, often word-for-word detailwere deemed too unlikely to be accidental, and the incriminating character of those similarities was held to be obvious. United States v. Walker, 191 F.3d 326, 331, 333 (2d Cir.1999). [7] But the facts heredates of entry and of travelare not so peculiar. Without some further explanation or context, the conclusion that many of the applications must be false is no more than supposition. In the end, this case is unlike those in which we have upheld this enhancement and more like those in which we have not. In all of these, some evidence was required to show that the court was sentencing the defendant not based on his characterin this case, his guilt with respect to four false applicationsbut on his actionsin this case, his filing of more than a hundred applications that were in fact false. Thus, we have held that a court may not assume that because the defendant was convicted of dealing drugs, all the money that he has is drug money, see Jones, 531 F.3d at 177 (finding the money to be drug money only, in part, because the defendant had no other means of employment that could be a legitimate source of the money), and we have held that simply because a defendant was convicted of cashing forged checks, it was error to conclude that every check he cashed was fraudulent, United States v. Spitsyn, 403 Fed.Appx. 572 (2d Cir.2010) (summary order) (remanding for resentencing because no evidence existed that 545 of the 578 checks defendant cashed were forged). Conversely, where the defendant's assistant testified that he had personally processed thousands of false applications for the defendant, we upheld an enhancement. See Walker, 191 F.3d at 339. When the Guidelines allow for punishment of relevant conduct as though it were convicted conduct, we have a special obligation to ensure that the evidence of relevant conduct is solid. See Shonubi II, 103 F.3d at 1089. The absence of such evidence here renders the district court's factual findings clearly erroneous.