David Hobart Payne v. United States

Whether 18 U.S.C. § 1346 honest-services fraud may rest on a theory that managed-care physicians are fiduciaries to their patients, where the United States persuaded this Court to adopt the contrary position in Pegram v. Herdrich, 530 U.S. 211 (2000), and the contradiction was undisclosed at every level of the proceedings below.

Whether Pegram's holding that fiduciary doctrine “translates into no rule readily applicable to HMO decisions or those of any other variety of medical practice,” 530 U.S. at 233, forecloses § 1346 fiduciary liability for physicians operating within California’s constitutionally closed Workers’ Compensation Medical Provider Network — and whether the Ninth Circuit’s contrary holding in United States v. Solakyan, 119 F.4th 575 (9th Cir. 2024), conflicts with the Sixth Circuit en banc in Jackson v. Sedgwick Claims Management Services, Inc., 731 F.3d 556 (6th Cir. 2013).

Whether the Tenth Amendment, Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64 (1938), and the McCarran-Ferguson Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1012(b), permit federal courts to impose common-law fiduciary duties on physicians within California’s Workers’ Compensation system — a system the State, by sovereign constitutional act under Article XIV, § 4, has expressly cleared of common-law content for over a century.

Whether the Fifth Amendment Grand Jury Clause, the Sixth Amendment right to jury determination of every offense element, and Bouie v. City of Columbia, 378 U.S. 347 (1964), forbid (a) trying a defendant on a theory the grand jury did not return; (b) instructing the jury on a state-law Travel Act predicate without including the operative statutory exception that the defendant’s conduct satisfied; and (c) applying a 2024 judicial expansion of § 1346 retroactively to 2008-2013 conduct. PARTIES TO THE PROCEEDINGS Petitioner David Hobart Payne, M.D., was the defendant in the district court and the appellant in the court of appeals. Respondent United States of America was the plaintiff in the district court and the appellee in the court of appeals. RELATED PROCEEDINGS • United States v. David Hobart Payne, M.D., No. 8:17-cr-00053-JLS (C.D. Cal.) (judgment of conviction; Hon. Josephine L. Staton).