Wire fraud — sufficiency of the evidence

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U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit

Criminal

Wire fraud — sufficiency of the evidence

The evidence was sufficient to convict the defendant of wire fraud, despite the lack of any eyewitness testimony.

“Proof of identity can be especially difficult when crimes can be committed from a remote location and without direct contact with the victim—a possibility that is likely to become increasingly common as technology continues to evolve. Chapman played his role in the scheme entirely from the other end of a cell phone or via correspondence, and so it would be all but impossible for any of the victims or investigators to take the stand and say that Chapman was the person they ‘saw’ committing the wire fraud. Someone may be able to identify the person in the courtroom as Lamar Christopher Chapman, but that would hardly solve the problem of proving that he was the Lamar Chapman involved in the scheme; it would prove only that 1) this man is named La-mar Chapman and 2) the Lamar Chapman name was used in the scheme. With such crimes, juries will often be forced to rely on circumstantial evidence to determine that the defendant has been correctly identified. That evidence may be substantial, but it does require in the end that an inference be drawn. But, as we said at the outset, circumstantial evidence is entirely acceptable to prove even such a weighty point as who pulled the trigger. It is also permissible to use for identity. In fact, given mounting scientific evidence about the unreliability of eyewitness identification, establishing or bolstering evidence of the defendant’s identity through means other than eyewitness testimony may in many cases be desirable. See, e.g., Hal Arkowitz & Scott O. Lilienfeld, Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts, SCI. AM., Jan.-Feb. 2010, available at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/?page=1 (last visited Aug. 14, 2014); Henry F. Fradella, Why Judges Should Admit Expert Testimony on the Unreliability of Eyewitness Testimo-ny, 2006 FED. CTS. L. REV. 3. Finally, Chapman’s case is an especially unattractive one in which to break new ground, since he did not raise this point at trial and did not present any argument to the jury that might have caused it to question the identity of the defendant.”

Affirmed.

12-3919 & 13-1515 U.S. v. Thomas

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Bucklo, J., Wood, J.