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November 30, 2010
Second Circuit "emphatically" rejects white-collar defendant's complaints about loss calculations
Anyone involved in any federal white-collar sentencing disputes will want to be sure to check out the Second Circuit's work today in US v. Woolf Turk, No. 09-5091 (2d Cir. Nov. 30, 2010) (available here). The panel opinion gets started this way:
Defendant-appellant Ivy Woolf Turk appeals the sentence imposed on her by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Buchwald, J.) after she pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1343, 1349. The district court sentenced Woolf Turk principally to 60 months’ imprisonment and ordered her to pay $29,660,192.36 in restitution to the victims of the mortgage fraud she perpetrated.
On appeal, Woolf Turk’s main argument is that the district court, in applying the United States Sentencing Guidelines, erred in calculating the amount of loss that Woolf Turk’s fraud caused. Specifically, she argues that the loss amount should be treated as zero because, at the time her fraud was discovered, there was still market value in the real property that purportedly collateralized the loans she had fraudulently obtained, and if that property had been sold before the collapse of the housing market, her victims could have been made whole. She also argues that the district court erred in: (1) finding that there were more than 50 victims; (2) failing to conduct an individualized assessment of the factors in 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a); and (3) imposing a substantively unreasonable sentence.
For the reasons that follow, we emphatically reject Woolf Turk’s principal argument. We also find no merit in her other claims of error, and thus affirm her sentence.
November 30, 2010 at 11:07 AM | Permalink
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Comments
Is "emphatically" rejected an argument the flip-side of "vigorously" objecting?
Posted by: USPO | Nov 30, 2010 7:22:18 PM
Is "emphatically" rejecting an argument the flip-side of "vigorously" objecting?"
Posted by: USPO | Nov 30, 2010 7:22:22 PM