I Won I Won!

After beating me up twice last week, the Fourth Circuit slipped in a favorable opinion in one of my cases last week, while I was out of the office, no less. In this case, our client was a bank employee who embezzled funds from accounts. The issue on appeal was whether the amount of loss (which basically determines sentence length under the Guidelines) should include only the funds she actually took for herself, or also the ones she moved around from account to account to "fix" the problem. The district court threw it all it, but we argued, and the Fourth agreed, that only the money she actually took out for herself should count. As a result, she should get a moderate reduction in her sentence.

Hooray for me!