223235P.pdf   04/10/2024  United States  v.  Okwuchukwu Jidoefor
   U.S. Court of Appeals Case No:  22-3235
                          and No:  22-3244
                          and No:  22-3601
   U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota   
   [PUBLISHED] [Loken, Author, with Smith, Chief Judge, and Colloton, Circuit 
   Judge] 
   Criminal case - Criminal law. While serving a term of supervised release 
   imposed on a prior bank fraud conviction, defendant, a Nigerian citizen, 
   participated in a scheme to defraud auto insurance companies by staging 
   crashes and submitting claims for unnecessary or nonexistent chiropractic 
   services. He pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and to violating a 
   condition of his supervised release, but only after the government agreed 
   to, among other things, jointly recommend a time-served sentence and to 
   write a letter to immigration authorities detailing his past cooperation 
   in his bank fraud case. Defendant received a time-served sentence, and the 
   district court ordered him to pay just over $22,000 in restitution to a 
   victim insurance company based on the company's actual losses. The 
   government attorney sent a letter to immigration authorities as promised, 
   but the U.S. Attorney's Office thereafter sent a second letter in error 
   claiming the attorney who sent the first letter had done so in his 
   personal capacity only. The office soon realized the error and sent a 
   third letter retracting the second one. The Board of Immigration Appeals 
   denied defendant's request to stay his then-pending removal proceeding, 
   the district court denied his request for a remedy for the government's 
   breach of his plea agreement, and defendant was removed to Nigeria. Held: 
   The district court did not err in denying defendant's request for a remedy 
   for the government's breach, as the promise breached was not the 
   government's sentencing recommendation or otherwise directly related to 
   the sentence imposed, and the government's retraction letter cured the 
   breach by providing defendant what he had bargained for, that is, a 
   statement from the government he believed would favorably impact his 
   ongoing removal proceeding, received by the Board prior to its unfavorable 
   decision. Nor did the district court err in calculating the amount of the 
   insurance company's losses and ordering restitution in that amount, as 
   defendant's admissions in his plea agreement established direct and 
   proximate cause for the claimed losses by a preponderance of the evidence, 
   a government witness testified he had independently verified a summary of 
   losses the insurance company had certified as true and correct, and there 
   was no evidence the company had overstated its losses. Finally, to the 
   extent the issue is not moot, defendant's challenge to his concurrent 
   time-served prison terms as substantively unreasonable lacks substantive 
   merit, as he requested the sentence.