United States v. Alexander Oriho

969 F.3d 917
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
DecidedAugust 10, 2020
Docket19-10291
StatusPublished
Cited by5 cases

This text of 969 F.3d 917 (United States v. Alexander Oriho) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Alexander Oriho, 969 F.3d 917 (9th Cir. 2020).

Opinion

FOR PUBLICATION

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, No. 19-10291 Plaintiff-Appellee, D.C. No. v. 2:19-cr-00667- DJH-1 ALEXANDER ORIHO, DBA Rhino’s Med. Trans, LLC, Defendant-Appellant. OPINION

Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Arizona Diane J. Humetewa, District Judge, Presiding

Argued and Submitted July 13, 2020 San Francisco, California

Filed August 10, 2020

Before: Eugene E. Siler, * Richard C. Tallman, and Danielle J. Hunsaker, Circuit Judges.

Opinion by Judge Tallman

* The Honorable Eugene E. Siler, Senior United States Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, sitting by designation. 2 UNITED STATES V. ORIHO

SUMMARY **

Criminal Law

The panel vacated the district court’s order requiring the defendant, who was indicted on healthcare fraud and money laundering charges, to repatriate any proceeds of the fraudulent scheme that he may have transferred to an African bank during a three-year period, up to $7,287,000, in order to preserve funds for potential forfeiture.

The panel determined that it had jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1292(a)(1) to review the interlocutory order, which was issued under the authority of 21 U.S.C. § 853.

The panel held that, as currently written, the repatriation order violates the defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. The panel concluded (1) that the order compels the defendant to incriminate himself by personally identifying, and demonstrating his control over, untold amounts of money located in places the government may not presently know about; (2) that the district court failed to apply the proper “forgone conclusion” exception test, relieving the government of its obligation to prove its prior knowledge of the incriminating information that may be implicitly communicated, thereby allowing the government to shirk its responsibility to discover its own evidence; and (3) that the government’s narrow promise of limited use immunity is insufficient to counterbalance these harms.

** This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader. UNITED STATES V. ORIHO 3

The panel remanded with instructions to conduct an evidentiary hearing designed to elicit from the government evidence supporting a more limited repatriation order. The panel instructed that if the evidence satisfies the proper foregone conclusion test, the district court will also need to ascertain whether the government must offer broader immunity to sufficiently protect the defendant’s Fifth Amendment privilege by ordering strict compliance with 18 U.S.C. §§ 6001–03.

COUNSEL

Daniel L. Kaplan (argued), Assistant Federal Public Defender; Jon M. Sands, Federal Public Defender; Office of the Federal Public Defender, Phoenix, Arizona; for Defendant-Appellant.

Rachel Cristina Hernandez (argued) and Mark J. Wenker, Assistant United States Attorneys; Krissa M. Lanham, Appellate Chief; Michael Bailey, United States Attorney; United States Attorney’s Office, Phoenix, Arizona; for Plaintiff-Appellee. 4 UNITED STATES V. ORIHO

OPINION

TALLMAN, Circuit Judge:

Alexander Oriho, who was indicted on healthcare fraud and money laundering charges, challenges a pre-trial repatriation order entered by the district court as a violation of his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. To preserve funds for potential forfeiture, the order requires Oriho to repatriate any proceeds of the fraudulent scheme that he may have transferred to any African bank during a three-year period, up to $7,287,000, despite the indictment alleging that he transferred only $760,000 to two specific banks in Uganda and Kenya. The district court reasoned that no compelled self-incrimination would result from the order, and even if such a risk existed, it was obviated by the government’s claims that it already knew Oriho had transferred some of the money to Africa. The order also rested on a promise from the government that it “will not introduce evidence that [Oriho] repatriated funds from Africa in its case-in-chief.”

The district court was presented with difficult issues of first impression, but we conclude that the challenged order compels Oriho to incriminate himself by personally identifying, and demonstrating his control over, untold amounts of money located in places the government may not presently know about. We also conclude that the district court failed to apply the proper “foregone conclusion” exception test, relieving the government of its obligation to prove its prior knowledge of the incriminating information that may be implicitly communicated by repatriation. The order thereby allows the government to shirk its responsibility to discover its own evidence. The government’s narrow promise of limited use immunity is insufficient to counterbalance these harms. We vacate and UNITED STATES V. ORIHO 5

remand with instructions to conduct an evidentiary hearing designed to elicit from the government evidence supporting a more limited repatriation order. If the evidence satisfies the proper foregone conclusion test, the district court will also need to ascertain whether the government must offer broader immunity to sufficiently protect Oriho’s Fifth Amendment privilege by ordering strict compliance with 18 U.S.C. §§ 6001–03.

I

In June 2019, the government filed a 43-count indictment against Oriho, charging him with healthcare fraud, identity theft, and unlawful transfers of the proceeds of those activities to Kenya and Uganda. The charges stem from Oriho’s ownership of a company called Rhino Med. Trans, LLC, which has been in operation since 2012. Rhino Med. is approved to receive government funds from the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System (AHCCCS), Arizona’s Medicaid program administrator, for non- emergency medical transportation services for indigent residents.

The indictment alleges that Oriho began billing AHCCCS for “thousands of false transport claims that never occurred or were inflated and fabricated to augment his reimbursements.” Evidence against Oriho includes multiple submissions with identical odometer readings and billing information, and records of invalid transport addresses. The indictment reflects the government’s belief that Oriho submitted around 105,000 false claims between January 1, 2016, and the return of the indictment on June 5, 2019, which generated approximately $7,287,000 in fraudulent payments from AHCCCS to Oriho. 6 UNITED STATES V. ORIHO

The first thirty counts of the indictment allege fraudulent healthcare reimbursement submissions. The following six counts charge use of the healthcare identification numbers of others. But this interlocutory appeal chiefly relates to the final group of charges, excerpted below. Counts 37–43 allege seven transfers of “criminally derived” funds from Bank of America account #X1850, to KCB and Stanbic bank accounts in Uganda and Kenya, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1957 (money laundering).

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Bluebook (online)
969 F.3d 917, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-alexander-oriho-ca9-2020.