What happened
The D.C. Circuit affirmed the convictions and sentences of Andre De Moya and Anthony Merritt over a scheme to bribe a District of Columbia tax official into reducing business tax liabilities, rejecting challenges to the evidence, jury instructions and sentencing.
The panel said De Moya and Merritt were convicted for bribing Vincent Slater, a supervisor in the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue's Adjustment Unit, through Merritt's work as an expediter for businesses connected to De Moya, including Echostage, Ultrabar and Barcode. The opinion said the scheme cost the District about $2.3 million in lost tax revenue.
After a 14-day trial, Merritt was convicted on all counts, while De Moya was convicted of conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery and two wire fraud counts and acquitted on four other wire fraud counts. Merritt received 110 months in prison and De Moya received 30 months, with each also receiving three years of supervised release.
Writing for the panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Florence Y. Pan said the evidence allowed the jury to find that De Moya knew the tax reductions were illicit rather than legitimate expediting work. Citing testimony from cooperating witnesses and corroborating documents, texts and phone records, the panel said "a reasonable jury plainly could infer" that De Moya knowingly and intentionally joined the bribery scheme.
The panel gave more traction to the defendants' challenge to the bribery instruction, saying the district court's course-of-conduct language was in tension with precedent requiring a link between things of value and specific official acts. But the court found the error harmless because the government tried the case as a concrete quid pro quo scheme: discrete cash payments for discrete reductions of specific tax obligations.
The court also rejected Merritt's sentencing arguments. It held he had not shown prejudice from his lawyer's failure to make broader policy objections to the Sentencing Guidelines' Loss Table, especially because counsel had already secured a substantial downward variance from a 188- to 235-month guideline range to 110 months.
Finally, the panel rejected Merritt's claim that the post-trial sentence punished him for going to trial after a plea deal fell apart. The court said plea bargaining commonly includes concessions that disappear once the bargain is gone, leaving prosecutors free to seek enhancements supported by the law and facts.