U.S. v. Wecht
| Decision Date | 14 May 2009 |
| Docket Number | No. 2:06-cr-26.,2:06-cr-26. |
| Citation | 619 F.Supp.2d 213 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES of America v. Cyril H. WECHT, Defendant. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Western District of Pennsylvania |
Richard L. Thornburgh, Jerry S. McDevitt, Mark A. Rush, Amy L. Barrette, K&L Gates, LLP, Pittsburgh, PA, for Defendant.
Presently pending before me in the above-captioned case is the Defendant's motion seeking reconsideration of the denial of his Rule 29 motions, the denial of his motion to dismiss charges brought under 18 U.S.C. § 666, and the denial of certain suppression motions. For the reasons set forth below, the Defendant's motion for reconsideration is granted and his requests for substantive relief are granted in part.
The Defendant, Dr. Cyril Wecht, is a renowned forensic pathologist and former Coroner of Allegheny County. On January 20, 2006, he was indicted on eighty-four counts of theft of honest services, mail fraud, wire fraud, and theft from an organization receiving federal funds in connection with his tenure as Allegheny County Coroner, which commenced in 1996.2 The case was initially assigned to the Hon. Arthur J. Schwab of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh Division.
The indictment has since been redacted and reformulated but, as originally drafted, it alleged that the Defendant, in his capacity as Allegheny County Coroner, had engaged in a scheme to misuse the personnel and resources of the Allegheny County Coroner's Office ("ACCO") toward his own personal and private gain and thus deprive Allegheny County and its citizens of the intangible right to the honest services of the Defendant and other ACCO employees. According to the indictment, this scheme involved the Defendant's use of county employees and resources to conduct his own private pathology business, which operated under the name Cyril H. Wecht and Pathology Associates, Inc. ("Wecht Pathology"), and to obtain services which benefitted the Defendant and his family members both personally and politically. Among other things, it was claimed that the Defendant had caused ACCO employees, while on duty, to perform private work on behalf of Wecht Pathology, to run personal errands for the Defendant and his family members, to act as chauffeurs for the Defendant and/or his family members on matters unrelated to ACCO business, and to participate in campaign efforts on behalf of the Defendant and/or his son. The indictment also alleged that the Defendant had engaged in numerous acts of wire fraud by generating fraudulent limousine charges and substantially inflated airfare expenses in connection with his private business and then transmitting the fraudulent bills by facsimile to his private clients. It alleged that the Defendant had committed mail fraud by causing fraudulent mileage reimbursement invoices to be prepared and mailed to various counties in Western Pennsylvania in connection with services rendered by Wecht Pathology. In actuality, it was charged, the Defendant had used county-owned vehicles for his private transportation needs but kept the reimbursement monies, even though ACCO (not the Defendant) had paid for the gas and maintenance on the vehicles used. Finally, the indictment alleged that, in each of the calendar years 2001 through 2005, the Defendant, acting in his capacity as Allegheny Coroner, had embezzled, stolen, obtained by fraud and otherwise converted without authority ACCO "property" (i.e., the use of ACCO personnel, vehicles, facilities, resources, equipment and space) valued at $5,000 or more, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 666(a)(1)(A).3.
It appears that much of the evidence utilized by the Government in support of these charges was obtained, either directly or indirectly, through the execution of two separate search warrants, both of which were presented to a United States Magistrate Judge on April 7, 2005. One of the warrants sought the seizure of approximately twenty boxes of private autopsy files from the offices of Wecht Pathology. The other sought the seizure of a laptop computer utilized by the Defendant's executive assistant, Eileen Young, and all of the information and data stored within the laptop. Through a number of pretrial proceedings, the defense sought unsuccessfully to suppress the evidence obtained from these searches.4
Prior to trial, the defense also sought, unsuccessfully, to obtain a dismissal of the Government's § 666(a)(1)(A) theft charges. (See Def.'s Mot. to Dismiss the Indictment [180] at Br. in Supp. [207].) In relevant part, the defense argued that the Government's charging theory misapplied the statute in several respects by (i) erroneously expanding the statute's reach to cover the theft of intangibles such as employee services; (ii) impermissibly and arbitrarily aggregating multiple alleged thefts occurring during the course of a given calendar year in order to satisfy the statute's $5,000 threshold; and (iii) applying the statute in a manner that resulted in duplicitous and unconstitutionally vague charges. This motion was denied by Judge Schwab in a memorandum opinion and order dated June 29, 2006[264].
On January 7, 2008, the Government filed a Redacted Indictment [656-2], which paired its case down from eighty-four charges to forty-one charges. These redacted charges were comprised of: twenty-four counts of theft of honest services—wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343, 1346 and 2 (Counts 1-24); three counts of theft of honest services—mail fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341, 1346 and 2 (Counts 25-27); five counts of wire fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1343 and 2 (Counts 28-32); four counts of mail fraud in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341 and 2 (Counts 33-36); and five counts of theft of property from an organization receiving federal funds, in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 666(a)(1)(A) and 2 (Counts 37-41).
The case proceeded to a lengthy trial which occurred over the course of several weeks in early 2008. The evidence closed on March 11, 2008 with the conclusion of the Government's case-in-chief.
In accordance with the trial court's directive, the defense filed a Rule 29 motion for a judgment of acquittal within hours after the close of the prosecution's case. ). In relevant part,5 the Defendant challenged the legal sufficiency of the Government's proof as it pertained to the mail fraud, wire fraud, and § 666(a)(1)(A) counts. With respect to the wire fraud charges at Counts 28 through 32, the defense argued that the Government had failed to establish that the alleged acts of fraud were material. The defense asserted a similar challenge with respect to the mail fraud charges at Counts 33 to 36, and further argued that the Government had failed to prove, as a factual matter, that the Defendant had driven a county vehicle on the days for which fake limousine charges had been generated. With regard to the § 666(a)(1)(A) charges at Counts 37 to 41, the defense argued that the Government's evidence was insufficient in at least two respects: it failed to establish that the Defendant knowingly embezzled, stole, obtained by fraud, or converted "property" within the meaning of the statute, and it further failed to place a value on the items alleged to be "property."
The Government filed its response to the Defendant's motion [818] later that same day. On the following day, Judge Schwab issued an order [822] denying the motion.
Jury deliberations ensued but, after approximately ten days of deliberations, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous verdict on any of the Government's forty-one counts. Consequently, on April 8, 2008, Judge Schwab declared a mistrial.
Thereafter, the defense filed a renewed motion for judgment of acquittal (see Docs. [912] and [913]) in which it reasserted the Defendant's insufficiency-of-proof arguments relative to the issues of materiality, the Defendant's alleged use of a county vehicle, and the valuation of items allegedly stolen in violation of § 666(a)(1)(A). The Government responded on April 23, 2008 (Doc. [925]), and the defense filed its reply on May 13, 2008[926]. The renewed motion was denied in a 24-page order entered by Judge Schwab on May 23, 2008[976].
In the meantime, the Defendant had moved for an order dismissing the indictment and barring a retrial on double jeopardy grounds. Judge Schwab denied this motion on April 27, 2008[933], and the Defendant took an appeal.
On September 5, 2008, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed Judge Schwab's April 27, 2008 ruling and remanded the matter for further proceedings. Pertinently for our purposes, the Court of Appeals concluded its opinion with the following directive:
Our holding today that there is no constitutional bar to retrying Dr. Wecht does not stand for the proposition that he must be retried. That is a decision that rests with the Government. Indeed, Wecht's prosecution is one that already has spanned more than thirty months. It has resulted in numerous appeals and emergency motions to this Court and, with the filing of this opinion, three lengthy precedential opinions.
If the Government chooses to proceed with a retrial, our view is that both sides and the interest of justice would benefit from a reduced level of rancor in the courtroom, fresh eyes on the case, and fewer forays to this Court by the parties, including intervening parties. This has been a highly charged, lengthy, and complex case involving serious criminal charges brought against a prominent public figure. The trial judge has been the referee in a heavyweight fight, and, as we have ruled, has generally made the...
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...over to the prosecutors for review. Orie, in claiming that these search warrants were defective, relies heavily on United States v. Wecht, 619 F.Supp.2d 213 (W.D.Pa.2009). According to Orie, the warrants in this case are nearly identical to those declared general and overbroad in Wecht, a c......
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...the defendant's motions to dismiss this case for lack of personal jurisdiction, see ECF No. 175; ECF No. 179; ECF No. 189. See Wecht, 619 F.Supp.2d at 222 (explaining that “a matter previously ruled upon [by predecessor judge] should be revisited only in extraordinary circumstances, as wher......
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