Opinion ID: 799726
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 6

Heading: Analysis The Sufficiency Challenge

Text: Vixamar's and Saintfleur's sufficiency arguments are straightforward enough. But before we get to them we need to discuss an issue that arose rather late in the game concerning the burden of persuasion for probation revocation. By way of a post-argument letter, see Fed. R.App. P. 28(j), the government argues that the reasonably-satisfied standard laid down in our caselaw see, e.g., DiIanni, 87 F.3d at 17; Gallo, 20 F.3d at 14; United States v. Czajak, 909 F.2d 20, 22 (1st Cir. 1990)is a lesser standard than the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, which is a more-likely-than-not rule, see Earle v. Benoit, 850 F.2d 836, 841 (1st Cir. 1988). Not so says Vixamar in response, pointing to cases outside this circuit and insisting that reasonably satisfied requires a preponderance of the evidence. We do not choose sides on this issue todayan issue that has not gotten full-briefing treatmentbecause Vixamar and Saintfleur lose either way. Here is why: (a) The judge had seen and heard Vixamar and Saintfleur during the 2009 sentencing hearing and the 2011 revocation hearing, and he found them to be liars: Vixamar had lied about her role in the passport scam, the judge noted, and later had lied to probation about her Clinical One job and to Clinical One about her true identity. Saintfleur had lied to probation about her checking-account situation, her employment status, and her brushes with the Reading police. And, ultimately, we see no reason to second-guess the judge's credibility findings. (b) Dated August 29, 2010, the stolen Gibbs check had been taken from the middle of an extra checkbook tucked inside a box in one of Gibbs's dresser drawers, and one could plausibly infer from that that whoever snatched it had had access to Gibbs's home for parts of August 2010. That ruled Saintfleur out. But not Vixamar, who as Gibbs's CNA certainly had access, and who by the way only had access because she had violated other probation conditions by working for a home-healthcare provider, lying to get that job, and cutting probation out of the loop. Saintfleur fires back that others had entrée to Gibbs's residence too, and she decries the fact that there was no evidence concerning the CNAs on duty when Vixamar was not. What she effectively wants is for us to use something over and above even the beyond-a-reasonable-doubt test, suggesting that we must reverse because the government did not disprove every possibility that might let her off the hook. Her argument goes nowhere, however, given the series of cases that hold that [t]he government need not prove a violation beyond a reasonable doubt, but must merely satisfy the court that a violation occurred, DiIanni, 87 F.3d at 17; accord Gallo, 20 F.3d at 14which makes the standard that she essentially pushes for out of the question. (c) Vixamar and Saintfleur also knew each other, an inescapable conclusion given the passport scam that they had run together. Desperate to poke holes in the judge's analysis, Vixamar accuses him of exaggerating the history between her and Saintfleur, taking particular offense at his saying that the two had a history of conspiring with each other to commit crimes using false documents. According to Vixamar, the record shows only that she had recruited Saintfleur into the passport-fraud scheme and had gone with her to the passport office to file the false paperwork, which, she intimates, is not much of a history. That is too a myopic view of the evidence, since the record shows that Saintfleur gave Vixamar the receipt so that Vixamar could pick up the passport the next day, and that the two then headed back to Saintfleur's house, at which point Vixamar gave Saintfleur some of the money that she had promised her for helping out. Just as importantly, Vixamar glides over the fact that she and Saintfleur had been friends for five or six months before she sprung the passport-fraud idea on Saintfleur. No matter. The judge's description of the defendants' conspiracy history jibed with the evidence and does not come close to clear error. As a fallback, Vixamar protests that the judge's history comment shows that he was swayed by their propensity to commit crimes together, which is a Fed. R.Evid. 404(b)-type argument. Rule 404(b) holds that evidence of past crimes is inadmissible to prove that a defendant probably did whatever she is currently accused of, simply because she has shown a propensity to break the law. See, e.g., United States v. Tse, 375 F.3d 148, 156 (1st Cir. 2004). But even assuming for argument's sake that Vixamar is right about her propensity point (something we do not decide), she gains nothing because the rules of evidence do not apply to probation-revocation proceedings. See, e.g., Fed.R.Evid. 1101(d). (d) Saintfleur admitted to depositing the stolen Gibbs check into her own account. She also admitted to helping an unnamed friend deposit a $6,000 check lifted from a patient at a Reading nursing home where she (Saintfleur) had worked as a CNA (without telling probation). Interestingly, the record reveals that Saintfleur had gone from stealing from stores to stealing from the elderly after teaming up with Vixamar on the passport scam. Saintfleur reminds us that she had told the judge under oath before the evidentiary hearing that she had gotten the check from a friend named Nerlande Sanon. Convinced that this is some sort of trump card, she and Vixamar contend that her statement proves that Vixamar was not the thief and that the two had not interacted with one another as charged. We disagree. For one thing, Saintfleur played fast and loose with the truth, the judge found, and even though prevaricators like her may not prevaricate all the time, see United States v. Williams, 216 F.3d 611, 614 (7th Cir. 2000), he also found that her Nerlande-Sanon story was not credible eitherand again, that was for him, not us, to decide, see United States v. Oquendo-Rivera, 586 F.3d 63, 67 (1st Cir. 2009). For another thing, the judge could and did credit Nerlande Sanon's testimony that she knew Saintfleur but not Vixamar or Gibbs, and that she had nothing to do with the Gibbs-check theft. Ultimately, these not-clearly-erroneous findings pour cold water on Saintfleur's theory. Wait a minute, Vixamar says. A government agent had found two Nerlande Sanons after running different internet searches but only one testified at the evidentiary hearing. Maybe the non-testifying Nerlande Sanon was the thief, Vixamar speculates. After all, the agent testified that this Nerlande Sanon lived in Randolph (just like Gibbs) and had worked as a CNA in 1976, and the defense introduced documents showing that she also had a dismissed larceny charge on her record from around that time, had filed for bankruptcy in 1996 but now owned a Mercedes, and has a daughter (Daphnee Germaine) who is a nurse. So maybe she or her daughter, the theory goes, had slipped Saintfleur the Gibbs check on the sly. Or because Nerlande Sanon is a fairly common Haitian name, Vixamar continues, maybe some other Nerlande Sanon was the culprit, and if the agent had only run more or better searches, he would have found her. This argument does not persuade. For starters, and to repeat ourselves, the judge rejected Saintfleur's Nerlande-Sanon story, as he had every right to do. Also, Vixamar again sounds like she wants us to reverse because the government did not eliminate all doubts about whether she had done what she is alleged to have done. But again, that is not the test. See, e.g., DiIanni, 87 F.3d at 17; Gallo, 20 F.3d at 14. Cinching matters, the agent also testified that the non-testifying Nerlande Sanon, who was an investigator with the state department of social services, had said that she did not know Saintfleur or Vixamar (she did not recognize them from their photos) and that she had not passed any checks on to either of them. She had been very helpful to his investigation, the agent stressed, and didn't appear to be holding anything back. And viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the government's theory of the case, we conclude that the judge did not stumble in spurning the suggestion that a Nerlande Sanon (either one of the two a government agent had found or one the agent had missed) was the Gibbs-check thief. Relatedly, Vixamar blasts the judge for intimating that Saintfleur had falsely fingered Nerlande Sanon as the wrongdoer to falsely clear Vixamar. But taking the evidence in the light most friendly to the government, making all reasonable inferences in its favor too, we see no reversible error here. Our bottom-line conclusion: Assuming (without deciding) that the reasonably-satisfied standard for probation revocation entails a more-likely-than-not threshold, we hold that the district judge did not clearly err in finding by a preponderance of the evidence that Vixamar had stolen the Gibbs check and that she and Saintfleur had associated with each other. Given the soundness of those factual findings and the leeway the law gives district judges for judgment in this area, we cannot say that the judge here abused his discretion by revoking Vixamar's and Saintfleur's probation. And so we move on.