UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. MONIQUE ANNETTE ELLIS - Articles

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. MONIQUE ANNETTE ELLIS

Posted by: Karen Belcher on Sep 6, 2019

Court: 6th Circuit Court (Published Opinions)

Attorneys 1:

ARGUED: Michael C. Holley, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellant. Mark S. Determan, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Appellee.

Attorneys 2:

ON BRIEF: Michael C. Holley, Ronald C. Small, FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellant. Mark S. Determan, S. Robert Lyons, Joseph B. Syverson, UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Washington, D.C., for Appellee.

Judge(s): NORRIS, STRANCH, and LARSEN, Circuit Judges.

Court Appealed: Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee at Nashville.

LARSEN, Circuit Judge. Over the course of more than four years, Monique Ellis submitted hundreds of false tax returns to the IRS using stolen identities, and she received hundreds of thousands of dollars in fraudulent refunds. When the IRS caught on to Ellis’s scheme, she was indicted on eight counts of wire fraud and eight counts of aggravated identity theft. A jury convicted her on all counts. On appeal, Ellis challenges: (1) the district court’s denial of her motion to dismiss the indictment; (2) the amount of loss the district court attributed to her for sentencing purposes; (3) the district court’s calculation of the amount she owed in restitution; and (4) the ability of the district court to order restitution for conduct that occurred more than five years before the grand jury returned the indictment. But neither the law nor the facts support overturning the district court in any regard. We thus AFFIRM the district court’s judgment.

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