Court Opinion

ID: 9488549
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 12:48:27.370616+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:52:57.225909
License: Public Domain

DAVID A. NELSON, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
Among the findings of fact made by the district court were these:
— that Cecil Brown, the payee of the $4,099 check passed or “uttered” by defendant Dixon with a forged endorsement, was Dixon’s roommate;
— that defendant Dixon knew Mr. Brown was disabled, knew he was in a rehabilitation center at the time of the crime, and knew he would be unable to stop the fraudulent transaction;
— that “Mr. Dixon passed Mr. Brown’s check ... specifically, because he knew Mr. Brown could not stop him;”
— that Mr. Dixon “targeted” Mr. Brown for the crime because Brown was incapacitated;
— that Mr. Brown was harmed financially by not having the proceeds of the check for a period of time; and
— that Mr. Brown “suffered anxiety and stress from not knowing when or if he would receive payment for his check, going through the claims process, and trying to subsist without the money for some time.”
None of these findings, in my view, was clearly erroneous.
Given the facts as found by the district court, it is clear, I believe, that Mr. Brown was “a victim of the offense” within the meaning of those words as used in U.S.S.G. § 3A1.1. Accordingly, and because defendant Dixon knew that Mr. Brown “was unusually vulnerable due to age, physical or mental condition, or ... was otherwise particularly susceptible to the criminal conduct,” the plain language of U.S.S.G. § 3A1.1 ap*137pears to mandate an increase in the guideline offense level.
It is true that in United States v. Wright, 12 F.3d 70, 73 (6th Cir.1993), we held that the adjustment called for by § 3A1.1 “may be applied only when a victim is harmed by a defendant’s conduct that serves as the basis of the offense of conviction.” But the district court was fully cognizant of Wright and concluded that Wright did not preclude an adjustment in the offense level here. I agree with the district court’s conclusion; Cecil Brown was “a victim” of the “offense of conviction” — the uttering of the check with the forged endorsement — and he was obviously harmed by this crime.
Wright was given a surprisingly broad application in United States v. Bondurant, 39 F.3d 666 (6th Cir.1994), where the defendant victimized his young son by making fraudulent use of the boy’s social security number. This court acknowledged that the son suffered “collateral consequences” in the form of a negative credit report, among other things, but held that “he was neither the victim nor the target of the offense of conviction.” Id. at 667. I am not persuaded that Bondurant is controlling here.
The offense of conviction in Bondurant entañed falsely representing a social security number to be that of the defendant. The credit card company to which the false representation was made suffered direct financial harm as a result, but the boy to whom the social security number had been issued did not. The boy was never deprived of his social security number, of course, even though his father had misused it.
In the case at bar, by contrast, the offense of conviction entañed passing a treasury check on which the payee’s endorsement had been forged. Once the instrument was passed, the payee — Cedi Brown — was deprived of more than $4,000 until he could demonstrate that he had been the victim of a fraud. Mr. Brown thus suffered direct financial harm of a kind not suffered by the defendant’s son in Bondurant. Mr. Brown was both a target of defendant Dixon’s crime and a victim of it, in my opinion, and I would therefore affirm the sentence imposed by the district court.