In United States v. Stein, No. 18-13762 (July 13,
2020) (Marcus, Luck, Ed Carnes), the Court re-affirmed the defendant’s
fraud convictions and affirmed an award of restitution.
In a previous appeal, the Eleventh Circuit remanded for the
district court consider to reconsider its loss finding with respect to restitution. The
Court held that, on remand, the district court relied on sufficient evidence to
establish causation, and the court was permitted to rely on the government’s
expert witness.
The Court declined to consider the defendant’s Brady/Giglio
challenges to this convictions, or his challenges to the forfeiture order, because
those challenges were outside the scope of the limited remand and could have
been raised in the initial appeal. The
Court found no exception to either the mandate rule or the law of the case
doctrine. As for the convictions, the
Court found that the evidence was neither newly discovered nor material. As for the forfeiture order, the Court
concluded that the defendant was not entitled to raise a new argument just
because the judgment was amended for unrelated restitution purposes, and the
Supreme Court’s intervening decision in Honeycutt dealt with a distinguishable
forfeiture statute.
