Opinion ID: 799726
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Revocation and Resentencing

Text: That hearing happened ten months later before the same district judge who had sentenced them originally. See Fed. R.Crim.P. 32.1(b)(2). Vixamar's and Saintfleur's counsel started off by saying that their clients would admit to all the charges that the magistrate judge had found probable cause for, but not to the others. And the prosecutor indicated that the government did not intend to proceed on these other charges anyway. Not so fast, said the judge. The magistrate judge had to decide only whether to detain or release the defendants, the judge added, but he (the district judge) had to decide whether to revoke their probation and resentence them. Given their different tasks, whatever the magistrate did is not binding on me. [2] I regard this, across the board, as an extremely serious matter, said the judge, and I'm not going to let it go until I've reliably found the facts. Saintfleur was sworn in, and, responding to the judge's questions, she admitted all the charges against her except the association one. She confessed to a lot of things, including that she had known all along that the Gibbs check was a stolen check and that she had later helped a friend deposit the stolen $6,000 check too. But, she insisted, neither she nor Vixamar had stolen the Gibbs check. A friend of mine, a woman named Nerlande Sanon, had, she said. [3] Hoping to get to the bottom of this, the judge set the matter down for a formal evidentiary hearing. Before the government presented its case, the judge questioned Vixamar under oath, and she conceded that she had falsified her Clinical One job application, had not come clean with Clinical One about her prior convictions, and had not told probation about her Clinical One job. But she denied the remaining charges. The judge then went over the ground rules for the hearing, stressing that he could revoke probation if the proof, reasonably viewed, satisfied him that a violation had occurred. See, e.g., United States v. DiIanni, 87 F.3d 15, 17 (1st Cir. 1996). But it may require a preponderance of the evidence to satisfy me, he added. [4] The judge asked whether anyone disagreed with that. And no one did. The judge then heard testimony from a number of government witnesses, including John Bringardner, a Randolph detective who spoke about the Gibbs-check theft; Melissa Knybel, a Clinical One director who talked about Vixamar's placement with Gibbs; and Nerlande Sanon (one of two Nerlande Sanons living in the area, a government search revealed), who testified about knowing Saintfleur but who denied knowing Vixamar or Gibbs or having a hand in the Gibbs-check heist. Neither Vixamar nor Saintfleur took the stand again (so the government never cross-examined them at the evidentiary hearing), and neither called any witnesses either. After hearing evidence and argument, the judge found that Vixamar and Saintfleur had proven themselves to be incorrigible frauds and liars with a history of conspiring with each other to commit crimes by using false documents. And he concluded that the government had proven by far more than a preponderance of the evidence that the two had committed the violations that they had admitted to, and also that Vixamar had stolen the Gibbs check and had worked with Saintfleur to have it forged and deposited. Vixamar's fate would have been the same, the judge said, even without her prior convictions for using her health-aide positions to steal from the elderlybut they reinforce[d] his conclusions. The government, he added, only fell short of proving that Saintfleur had not notified probation about being questioned by Randolph police, because the record showed that Detective Bringardner had tried to interview her (they had played a lot of phone tag) but never did. As for Saintfleur's story that a Nerlande Sanon had poached the Gibbs check, the judge did not buy it, even for a second, given that Saintfleur had zero credibility and that the Sanon who had testified here credibly denied taking the check. Also, the judge stressed, Saintfleur's decision not to testify and undergo cross-examination (as she had every right to do) undercut her story even if it were credible, which, again, it was not. Having revoked their probation, the judge turned his attention to resentencing. See 18 U.S.C. § 3564(e) (explaining how [a] sentence of probation remains conditional and subject to revocation until its expiration or termination); id. § 3565(a)(2) (discussing how a court can revoke the sentence of probation and resentence the defendant). The Sentencing Commission classifies three grades of probation violationsA, B, and Cwith the grades determined by the conduct constituting any federal, state, or local offense punishable by various terms of imprisonment. U.S.S.G. § 7B1.4. It also offers a table listing recommended sentencing ranges for probation violations. U.S.S.G. § 7B1.4(a). Vixamar and Saintfleur had committed Grade B violations, the judge said, which, when combined with their criminal histories, put Vixamar's revocation GSR at 6 to 12 months and Saintfleur's at 8 to 14 months. But the judge added, and the parties agreed, that he could also factor into his resentencing decision what their GSRs had been for the passport-fraud crimes (12 to 18 months for Vixamar; 18 to 24 months for Saintfleur) and what the statutory sentencing range had been for those crimes too (up to 10 years on each passport-fraud count). And he noted that he could depart upward if the original sentence was the result of a downward departure.... U.S.S.G. § 7B1.1 cmt. n. 4. Pausing at this point, the judge asked defense counsel whether he had calculated the GSRs correctly, and they answered yes. The government then asked for a sentence at the top of each defendant's GSR. But Saintfleur's lawyer floated the idea that the government's recommendation might breach some prosecutorial promise that had persuaded her to plead guilty to passport fraud in 2009. See Santobello v. New York, 404 U.S. 257, 262, 92 S.Ct. 495, 30 L.Ed.2d 427 (1971) (holding that prosecutors must honor their end of any plea agreement that they make). So, in response, the judge said that he would not rely on the government's sentencing proposal. Vixamar's lawyer asked the judge to sentence his client to a year and a day in jail and six months of home confinement. [5] And Saintfleur's attorney requested that his client get probation again, with the condition that she serve a year and a day in a halfway house. The judge resentenced them each to 36 months in prison and 36 months of supervised release, however. And he explained why, hitting the relevant sentencing factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). [6] Turning to Vixamar, the judge reminded her that he had given her a real sentencing break in 2009remember, her record had shown multiple convictions for stealing from the elderly, and she had been the driving force behind the passport-fraud stuntsomething he had done even though he had had serious doubts about whether she had learned anything from her repeated brushes with the law. Vixamar then not only lied to probation (about her job situation, for example) and to Clinical One (by handing over a false social-security number and date of birth, among other things), but she also committed another especially despicable crimestealing from a person in her care who could not protect herself. [Y]ou're a menace, a tremendous danger to other people, the judge said, particularly to [the] very vulnerable, and he thought that her sentence would deter her and others from crimes like this and protect the public too. And he noted that 18 months (the high end of the GSR) would have been perfectly reasonable for her passport-fraud crimes. But he concluded that 36 months was justified because she had violated the trust that he had placed in her. Speaking to Saintfleur, the judge said that he could have locked [her] up, very reasonably, for two years in November of 2009, and if he had i.e., if he had not given her a sentencing break toothe Gibbs-check theft would not have happened. Like Vixamar, she had lied to probation and had abused the trust that he had placed in her. Also like Vixamar, she had shown herself to be a very dangerous personshe had gotten worse over time, graduating from shoplifting to passport fraud to fleecing the elderlyand he concluded that her sentence was necessary for deterrence and public protection as well. In his written statements of reasons in support of the sentences, see 18 U.S.C. § 3553(c)(2), the judge, among other things, again referenced the § 3553(a) factors and noted too how Vixamar and Saintfleur had gotten downward variances at their original sentencingall of which justified the above-Guidelines sentences, he wrote.