In United States v. Sutherland, 103 F.4th 200 (4th Cir. 2024), CA4 here and GS here, the Court rejects the criminal defendant’s collateral attacks on convictions for filing false tax returns and obstructing an official proceeding. (The latter conviction was for delivering false documents to the government attorney assisting the grand jury in the tax crimes investigation.) The collateral attacks were mounted by a petition under 28 USC § 2255 and a petition for the writ of coram nobis. The principal claim for both methods of collateral attack was an alleged ineffective assistance of counsel (“IAC”) at the criminal trial where the defendant was convicted. The defendant appealed the convictions, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed. United States v. Sutherland, 921 F.3d 421 (4th Cir. 2019), GS here; see also Obstruction Conviction Affirmed for Presentation of False Documents to AUSA Serving as Attorney for Government for Grand Jury (Federal Tax Crimes Blog 4/26/19), here.
I post to this blog primarily to refer readers to the excellent discussion of the collateral attack remedies under § 2255 and coram nobis. Readers wanting the nuance should read the opinion (19 pages, but worth the read). Key summary points are:
1. The principal IAC claim was that defendant’s trial counsel in the criminal trial gave inadequate representation at trial and at sentencing because of failure to present expert tax testimony that would have shown he did not owe the amount of tax claimed by the Government. The Court of Appeals describes this testimony at sentencing as (Slip op. 4-5):
Seeking to mitigate the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines loss calculation in his presentence report, Sutherland presented testimony from Jayne Frazier, a certified public accountant. Frazier reviewed Sutherland’s tax returns for the years 2007 to 2010 and testified that Sutherland had underreported his income by hundreds of thousands of dollars in the relevant timeframe. Despite that fact, she testified that Sutherland’s total tax liability for that period was less than the Government alleged because Sutherland failed to claim various business-expense deductions in 2008, 2009, and 2010, which, if claimed, would have reduced his taxable income for those years. Notably, however, Frazier did not independently audit Sutherland’s tax returns, and her calculations were based largely on information provided by Sutherland, much of which could not be corroborated by itemized receipts or other documentation. See, e.g., J.A. 1230 (Frazier testifying that her calculations included hundreds of thousands of dollars of unclaimed business expenses that were “all cash”). She [*5] also stated that her income calculations for Sutherland excluded approximately half of the $2 million in transfers from STS to Sutherland’s companies because it was her “understanding” that those funds came from a line of credit in favor of STS and thus would be “treated as loan advances” and not “taxable income.” J.A. 1209.
The district court overruled Sutherland’s objection to the presentence report’s loss calculation, finding that Sutherland’s “self-reported information” to Frazier “was not reliable.”
2. In February 2021, after completing the period of supervised relief on the tax convictions but before completing the period of supervised relief on the obstruction conviction (not sure why they would be different), the defendant filed (1) the “§ 2255 petition [which] targets the obstruction conviction” and (2) the coram nobis petition which “targets the tax fraud convictions.” (Actually, the convictions were for filing false tax returns, commonly called tax perjury, rather than “tax fraud” which is commonly called tax evasion.) The Court explains why defendant chose the two collateral attack procedures (Slip Op. 6 n. 1):
