United States v. Stein

Defendant, an attorney, appealed his conviction and sentence after being convicted of mail, wire, and securities fraud. The convictions were based on evidence that he fabricated press releases and purchase orders to inflate the stock price of his client Signalife, a publicly-traded manufacturer of medical devices. The court rejected defendant's Brady v. Maryland claim, finding that defendant identified only one potential Brady document, which contained no information favorable to him and was accessible through reasonable diligence before trial. Furthermore, defendant failed to identify any suppressed material or any materially false testimony on which the government relied, purportedly in violation of Giglio v. United States. In regard to defendant's sentence, the court concluded that the district court erred in calculating an actual loss figure based on the losses of all investors under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act of 1996, 18 U.S.C. 3663A, and failed to determine whether intervening events caused the Signalife stock price to drop and, if so, whether these events were unforeseeable such that their effects should be subtracted from the actual loss figure. Accordingly, the court affirmed the conviction, vacated the sentence, and remanded with instructions. View "United States v. Stein" on Justia Law