United States of America v. Sheldon Tree Top<\/em>, No. 18-1816 (8th Cir. July 26, 2019),<\/a> a criminal case that had arisen under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, 16 U.S.C. \u00a7 668(a) and the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. \u00a7\u00a7 3372(a)(1), 3373(d)(2).\u00a0 Defendant pleaded guilty to selling eagle feathers in violation of the Eagle Protection Act, and the Lacey Act count was dismissed.\u00a0 Defendant was sentenced to six months imprisonment and one year of supervised release.\u00a0 As a condition of supervised release, the district court ordered that defendant pay $5,000 in restitution.\u00a0 Defendant appealed and challenged the restitution order, and the Eighth Circuit reversed.<\/p>\nThe case was based on two transactions.\u00a0 In the first, the defendant sold a bald eagle feather to a confidential informant for $50 and, in the second, he sold 63 eagle and hawk feathers to the same informant for $80.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Under the\u00a0Mandatory Victims Restitution Act, 18 U.S.C. \u00a7 3663A, the restitution award is limited to the victim’s provable actual loss, which the government is required to establish by a preponderance of the evidence.\u00a0 The district court set the amount at $5,000 which was a sum that neither party had proposed.\u00a0 This amount was based on the court’s standing order on forfeiture of collateral in lieu of appearance in cases involving petty offenses, which listed the value of a whole or mounted bald or golden eagle as between $5,000 and $10,000.\u00a0 Expert testimony showed that four of the feathers had come from a dead juvenile eagle.<\/p>\n
The court of appeals reversed on the ground that a court can only order restitution for the offense for which the defendant had pleaded guilty, not for other charged or suspected conduct.\u00a0 Here, the defendant had pleaded guilty, not to killing a bald eagle or rough-legged hawk, but to selling eagle feathers.\u00a0 Therefore,<\/p>\n
[B]ased on the existing record the actual loss caused by Tree Top’s offense of conviction is limited to the amount of money that the government expended to buy the eagle feathers.\u00a0 As a result, we reverse the order of restitution and modify the judgment to decrease the restitution amount to $130.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Slip op. at 3 (footnotes omitted).\u00a0 The court remanded for the district court to consider the imposition of a fine in the first instance since the denial of the government’s original request for a fine had been based on the sizeable restitution award.\u00a0 The court also found no plain error in the district court’s decision to award the restitution to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a foundation created by federal law, which was not the actual victim and which is not technically a governmental agency.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by John M. Simpson. On July 26, 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit issued a decision in United States of America v. Sheldon Tree Top, No. 18-1816 (8th Cir. July 26, 2019), a criminal case that had arisen under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, 16 U.S.C. \u00a7 668(a) and … <\/p>\n
Continue reading “8th Circuit Reverses Restitution Order In Eagle Feathers Sale Case”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,88,398,5,399,397,396],"ppma_author":[697],"class_list":["post-230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-animal-law","tag-bald-and-golden-eagle-protection-act","tag-eagle-feathers","tag-john-simpson","tag-lacey-act","tag-mandatory-victims-restitution-act","tag-restitution"],"authors":[{"term_id":697,"user_id":317,"is_guest":0,"slug":"jmsimpson","display_name":"John M. Simpson","avatar_url":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/38\/2018\/06\/simpsonjohn-125x150.jpg","0":null,"1":"","2":"","3":"","4":"","5":"","6":"","7":"","8":""}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/317"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.duanemorris.com\/animallawdevelopments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}