Opinion ID: 71480
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Sowels and Harris's Intended Loss

Text: Harris argues that the method of assessing intended loss as being equal to the aggregate limit of stolen credit cards, which we approved in Sowels, cannot be applied to her case, because our holding in Sowels was conditioned on the fact that the defendant had not yet used the cards he had stolen at the time he was apprehended. See generally Sowels, 998 F.2d at 251. She contends that, while the method used in Sowels is appropriate in cases where the cards have not been used, the actual charges are better indicators of a defendant's intended loss in cases where the defendant managed to make fraudulent charges before being apprehended. See generally id. She notes that in Sowels, the sentencing court had calculated the loss on cards that had actually been charged by adding the actual charges, rather than the credit limits. Id. at 250. She concludes that it was improper for the district court to hold that she intended to inflict a loss of the aggregate limit of the cards she compromised, because most of the cards she compromised were charged well below their limits. Harris is correct that the reasoning in Sowels rests in part on the fact that the defendant was not able to establish a pattern of charges due to the intervention of law enforcement. See Sowels, 998 F.2d at 251 (Had Sowels completed or withdrawn from his offense before being apprehended, he might have been able to rebut the evidence that he intended to charge the cards to their limit.). However, the broader principle behind our result in Sowels was the rule of Wimbish. This is evident from the fact that Sowels relied heavily on our unpublished opinion in United States v. Mordi. See Sowels, 998 F.2d at 251. In Mordi, the defendant was arrested for using stolen credit cards to purchase merchandise. 1993 WL 152261, at . At sentencing, the district court found that he had inflicted an actual loss of $45,368.00. Id. It further found that his intended loss was $90,768.00, because at the time the defendant was arrested, there remained $45,400.00 in unused credit on the accounts the defendant had compromised. Id. The district court used the larger number to determine his sentence, in accordance with the Guidelines. Id. at . On appeal, we affirmed this sentence. Id. at . Citing Wimbish for support, we held that the defendant recklessly had put his victims at risk for the aggregate amount of the credit cards' limits. Id. We held that he could therefore be held to have intended a loss of the cards' aggregate limit. Thus, the central rationale behind Sowels is derived from our opinion in Mordi, which itself is based on the rule of Wimbish. As is illustrated by our opinion in Mordi, whether or not a stolen credit card has sustained charges does not dispositively determine whether or not its full credit limit was recklessly jeopardized by the defendant's crime. See Mordi, 1993 WL 152261, at . A defendant can more easily establish a modus operandi defense where his offense was completed before he was apprehended by the authorities. See Sowels, 998 F.2d at 251-52. But even in a case involving a completed offense, it may still be reasonable for the sentencing court to find that the defendant intended to inflict a loss of the entire credit limit of a stolen card if he committed his crime in such a way that the entire limit was recklessly jeopardized. See Mordi, 1993 WL 152261, at  (holding that a defendant had intended to inflict the loss of the aggregate limit of stolen cards, because his crime had recklessly jeopardized this limit, even though the actual fraudulent charges on the cards did not exceed it). Therefore, we disagree with Harris that Sowels 's application of the rule of Wimbish to a case of credit card theft wholly relied on the fact that the defendant in Sowels had not actually made any fraudulent charges at the time he was apprehended by the authorities. [15] The fact that Harris's co-conspirators had made charges on the cards she compromised before they were stopped by the authorities merely means that it was easier for her to mount a modus operandi defense to the PSR's finding that she intended to inflict a loss of the entire aggregate limit. It did not guarantee that this defense would succeed.