Opinion ID: 2746015
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Loss-Calculation Claim

Text: Ms. Edwards also seeks a COA to determine if she should have received an evidentiary hearing on whether counsel was ineffective for failing to object at sentencing to inclusion of the 1U transaction in the district court’s loss calculation. Ms. Edwards’s loss-calculation claim challenges her sentence, which includes her term of imprisonment, supervised release, and restitution. We conclude no reasonable jurist could debate the district court’s rejection of this claim without holding an evidentiary hearing because (1) any challenge to imprisonment or supervised release is now moot, and (2) the challenge regarding restitution was inadequately raised in the district court.
Ms. Edwards completed her prison sentence in March 2012. To the extent she now raises the loss-calculation claim to shorten her term of imprisonment, “it is obviously no longer possible to provide such relief.” Rhodes v. Judiscak, 676 F.3d 931, 933 (10th Cir. 2012). -7- To the extent she raises the loss-calculation claim to reduce or eliminate her remaining period of supervised release, she has failed to allege any connection between the court’s loss calculation and the length of her supervised release. Nor can she claim her supervised release would have been reduced or eliminated had the district court held an evidentiary hearing and concluded Ms. Edwards’s term of incarceration was too long because our precedent “clearly prohibits habeas courts—including this court and the district court below—from modifying a supervised release term to make up for a too-long prison sentence.” Id. The time to challenge the term of imprisonment or the supervised release has passed, and Ms. Edwards’s claim in this respect is moot. See id. (“A case becomes moot when a plaintiff no longer suffers actual injury that can be redressed by a favorable judicial decision.” (quotations omitted)).
To the extent Ms. Edwards argues the loss-calculation claim implicates the “imposition of restitution,” Aplt. Br. at 21, the district court deemed that aspect of the claim waived. Order, ECF No. 2560, ROA, Vol. 2 at 123-24 n.4 (observing the supplemental motion clarified Ms. Edwards’s loss-calculation claim, but focused only on how the loss calculation affected the prison sentence, leading the court to conclude that “[i]n the absence of a clear and conspicuous argument challenging the restitution amount on this ground, the Court deems Ms. Edwards to have waived submission of this issue”). Ms. Edwards’s pro se motion was a series of memoranda totaling 50 pages and lacked organization, clear arguments, grammatically correct sentences, and record -8- citations to support the asserted facts. See Mot., ECF No. 2488, ROA, Vol. 1 at 535-84. The motion mentioned the 1U transaction only once within the context of restitution and the loss-calculation claim, and failed to differentiate whether she challenged her trial counsel’s effectiveness, the district court’s calculation, or both. See id. at 549. Courts can construe a pro se litigant’s arguments “liberally,” United States v. Pinson, 584 F.3d 972, 975 (10th Cir. 2009), but here the court asked counsel to clarify Ms. Edwards’s arguments. In the supplemental motion, counsel explained the scope of the vague losscalculation claim was limited to challenging the term of imprisonment, which, as we have concluded, is a moot issue. We agree with the district court that Ms. Edwards did not adequately raise a claim about the amount of restitution.