United States v. Arun Dhavamani

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
• Decided: June 16, 2023
• Docket: 22-4082
• Status: Unpublished

Opinion

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UNPUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 22-4082

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff - Appellee,

v.

ARUN DHAVAMANI,

Defendant - Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of West Virginia, at Bluefield. David A. Faber, Senior District Judge. (1:19-cr-00159-1)

Submitted: December 21, 2022 Decided: June 16, 2023

Before GREGORY, Chief Judge, THACKER, Circuit Judge, and MOTZ, Senior Circuit Judge.

Affirmed by unpublished per curiam opinion.

ON BRIEF: Wesley P. Page, Federal Public Defender, Jonathan D. Byrne, Appellate Counsel, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellant. William S. Thompson, United States Attorney, Jennifer Rada Herrald, Assistant United States Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Charleston, West Virginia, for Appellee.

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PER CURIAM:

Arun Dhavamani was convicted of traveling in interstate commerce with the intent

to engage in illicit sexual conduct, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2423(b). Dhavamani

appealed, contending, among other things, that the Government agents intentionally

manufactured federal jurisdiction in this case. We vacated in part and remanded to the

district court “for a factual finding as to whether law enforcement officers changed the

agreed meeting location from West Virginia to Virginia for the sole purpose of creating

federal jurisdiction.” United States v. Dhavamani, No. 20-4306, 2021 WL 4786614, at *1

(4th Cir. Oct. 14, 2021). We affirmed Dhavamani’s conviction and sentence in all other

respects. Id.

On remand, the district court held an evidentiary hearing during which four

members of the FBI Crimes Against Children Task Force testified. The officers were

consistent in their testimony that the task force does not prefer federal or state cases and

task force members are not pressured or even encouraged to bring more federal cases. The

officers explained that the meeting location in this case was changed for safety reasons and

because they anticipated that more people would be present at the original meeting place

at the time the meeting was to take place.

Following the hearing, the district court concluded that the manufactured

jurisdiction doctrine did not apply. The court specifically found all four officers credible

and that their testimony clarified the conflict in the testimony presented during

Dhavamani’s trial. The court found that creating federal jurisdiction was “not even one

reason for changing the meeting location . . . [i]t certainly was not the sole reason.”

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Addressing the discrepancy between Trooper Jillian Yeager’s trial testimony, in

which she testified that the meeting location was changed in order to get Dhavamani across

the state line in order to make this a federal case, the district court acknowledged that

Yeager was not a member of the task force at that time and she was not privy to the reasons

for the change in the meeting place. The district court credited Yeager’s testimony during

the evidentiary hearing in which she explained that she was not involved in planning the

meeting location for Dhavamani and that she misunderstood the questions asked at trial

about why the meeting location had been changed. The district court thus found that the

evidence did not support a conclusion that federal jurisdiction was manufactured.

We review factual findings by the district court for clear error. United States v.

Charboneau, 914 F.3d 906, 912 (4th Cir. 2019). A factual “finding is clearly erroneous

when although there is evidence to support it, the reviewing court on the entire evidence is

left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed.” United

States v. United States Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364, 395 (1948) (internal quotation marks

omitted). We have held that a district court’s credibility determination, made after

observing the witnesses and weighing their credibility during an evidentiary hearing, is

entitled to “the highest degree of appellate deference.” United States v. Slager, 912 F.3d

224, 233 (4th Cir. 2019) (internal quotation marks omitted). Here, the district court

concluded that all four witnesses who testified during the hearing were credible. Where a

district court makes a factual determination based on its “decision to credit the testimony

of one of two or more witnesses, each of whom has told a coherent and facially plausible

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story that is not contradicted by extrinsic evidence, that finding, if not internally

inconsistent, can virtually never be clear error.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).

With these standards in mind, we have reviewed the record and we conclude that

the district court did not err in finding that the Government agents did not change the

meeting location for the sole purpose of creating federal jurisdiction and therefore that the

manufactured jurisdiction doctrine did not apply. See United States v. Davis, 855 F.3d 587,

589, 592 (4th Cir. 2017). Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s order and therefore

affirm the judgment. We dispense with oral argument because the facts and legal

contentions are adequately presented in the materials before this court and argument would

not aid the decisional process.

AFFIRMED