Derickson Lawrence v. United States

Whether 18 U.S.C. §§ 1341 and 1343 require proof that a defendant intended both to deceive and to wrongfully obtain money or property - such that a jury instruction permitting conviction upon proof of either element alone omits an essential element of the offense — where the Fourth Circuit affirmed convictions on counts for which the government's own witness testified the invoices were reviewed before payment, agreed upon, and not fraudulent or false, and the government separately conceded the same invoices contained no false representations, in conflict with, the Ninth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Miller, the Seventh Circuit's decision in United States v. Chanu, and this Court’s decisions in Shaw v. United States, Kelly v. United States, and Ciminelli v. United States. Whether the Fifth Amendment's Grand Jury Clause and Russell v. United States, 369 U.S. 749 (1962) are violated when a wire fraud conviction rests on a wire transmission the government admitted before trial it could not identify — where the indictment charged no specific wire, the district court denied a pretrial motion to dismiss for this defect, the government supplied a wire post-indictment through a Bill of Particulars without grand jury resubmission, the parties stipulated that for the specific loan charged it is unknown which server was used, and the Fourth Circuit affirmed — in direct conflict with the Fourth Circuit's own decisions in United States v. Howard, 590 F.2d 564 (4th Cir. 1985) and United States v. Okun (4th Cir. 2009), and with the unanimous rule of the First, Second, Fifth, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits that a Bill of Particulars cannot cure a defective indictment. III. Whether, where venue must be established independently for each count of a federal indictment, Article III, the Sixth Amendment, and 18 U.S.C. § 3237(a) permit the government to establish wire fraud venue for. a specific count in a district where the defendant had no connection on that count — where the parties stipulated the defendant resided in New York, the transmission originated in New York, SB A decision-makers were located in Washington D.C., the government's own exhibit named the SBA in Washington as the destination, the parties stipulated the server used for the specific loan is unknown, and government counsel could not explain the server s location, where the district court ruled that venue is proper 'wherever the wire transmission goes' and 'wherever it continues this process, in conflict with United States v. Jefferson, 674 F.3d 332 (4th Cir. 2012), United States v. Sterling, 860 F.3d 233 (4th Cir. 2017), United States v. Johnson, 323 U.S. 273 (1944), Travis v. United States, 364 U.S. 631 (1961), and United States v. Brennan, 183 F.3d 139 (2d Cir. 1999), and contrary to Travis's prohibition on construing venue to give the government the choice of a favorable tribunal. IV. Whether the admission of a confidential settlement communication without Rule 403 balancing and in violation of Federal Rule of Evidence 408 violated the Fifth Amendment right to present a complete defense on Count 9, where the improperly admitted document was used four times to establish criminal intent while the government's own witness confirmed under cross-examination that the defendant sent the document to re-establish a business relationship, the government's own records show a 46-to-l vendor overbilling ratio that independently explains the alleged loss, and the government subsequently reduced Golden Corral restitution by 77 percent upon being confronted with the operational evidence at sentencing — rendering the trial fundamentally unfair under Andrew v. White, 604 U.S. 86 (2025), which the Fourth Circuit never applied.