If you’re ever involved in a bank fraud case, you should probably read the Second Circuit’s opinion reversing Mr. Felix Nkansah’s bank fraud conviction. If the government wants to convict someone for bank fraud, the Second Circuit says they’ve got to show that the person was trying to defraud a bank (as opposed to trying to defraud someone or something else).
The Company You Keep
Felix Nkansah fell in with some bad company.
James and Theresa DeMuro owned an engineering company in New Jersey called TAD Associates.
Not unlike yesterday’s tax case from the Eleventh Circuit, TAD Associates withheld money for taxes from its employees paychecks. TAD did not send that money along to the IRS.
The IRS approached the DeMuros about this. It was a civil matter at that point – the IRS required the DeMuros to set up a special trust account where they were to put their employees taxes.
Stuart Register ran a business that conducted criminal background checks on people.
He had a number of employees. Employees, of course, have to be paid. To pay them, he used a payroll company – PrimePay. PrimePay withheld taxes from the employees’ pay, and told Mr. Register how much he needed to send to the government for those taxes.
Mr. Register did not send money that was withheld to pay taxes.
Justice Scalia recently made headlines by taking a cheap shot at the ranks of federal district court judges.
As the Associated Press reported (hat tip to Sentencing Law and Policy):
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia says the quality of federal judges has suffered because there are too many of them. Testifying before a Senate committee Wednesday, Scalia blamed Congress for making federal crimes out of too many routine drug cases. In turn, that created a need for more judges.
The Federal Criminal Appeals Blog