Opinion ID: 746455
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Scheme to Defraud Federal Government of Tuition

Text: 68 The government helped to pay for the advanced degrees of its employees, the student defendants, by paying to UTSI their fees. No student, however, wrote his or her own thesis or dissertation, the primary component of the advanced degree program. Counts One, Eight, and Fifteen in the Superseding Indictment therefore charge defendants with violating § 1341 by defrauding the government of the tuition money. Count One rests upon a September 20, 1989 invoice from UTSI to NASA for the fees of Congo; Count Eight rests upon a July 21, 1989 invoice from UTSI to NASA for the fees of Potter; and Count Fifteen rests upon a February 15, 1990 invoice from UTSI to the Department of the Army for the fees of Faulkner. The indictment charged Frost and Turner with all of these counts, and each student with the count relating to his or her own fees. The jury convicted each defendant of each charged count. 69 The student defendants urge that the invoices cannot support their convictions because they did not cause or intend the mailings to be sent. This claim is without merit. As explained, a mailing may support a mail fraud conviction as long as the defendant knew that use of the mails would follow in the ordinary course of business, or that a reasonable person would have foreseen use of the mails. See, e.g., Oldfield, 859 F.2d at 400. A reasonable jury certainly could have found that defendants reasonably should have foreseen that use of the mails would occur when UTSI obtained their tuition money from the government. Although defendants also claim that the vouchers did not further execution of the scheme, the success of the scheme to obtain the tuition money obviously was causally linked to, if not completely dependent upon, the vouchers. See Downs, 870 F.2d at 615; Wellman, 830 F.2d at 1461 n. 11. 70 The conviction of Potter rests upon an invoice dated July 21, 1989. She argues that this mailing cannot support her conviction because the mailing preceded any plan to plagiarize her thesis. The record, however, reveals that Frost told Potter in December, 1989 or January, 1990 that she should begin working on her thesis, and that Potter received from Frost or Turner only several months later the FWG report which would be her thesis. Accordingly, a reasonable jury could have concluded that defendants had agreed before the mailing of the invoice that Potter would obtain her degree through plagiarism, and that the invoice therefore furthered the scheme to defraud the government of its payment for her degree. 71 Potter also argues that the government was not defrauded of any tuition money because, even though she did not write her thesis, she underwent a legitimate learning experience by studying the FWG report which she passed off as her thesis. She also insists that NASA frequently pays for its employees merely to take classes, and that she could have taken a non-thesis option when pursuing her master's degree. Potter, however, ignores the fact that the record easily yields the conclusion that NASA was relieving Potter of her obligation to pay UTSI because it was expecting her to obtain a master's degree by writing a legitimate thesis. Further, there was evidence that the non-thesis option was not available to Potter, who lacked significant professional engineering experience. NASA did not get what it was paying for simply because Potter attended classes and examined the FWG report. 72