United States v. Jacqueline Wheeler

753 F.3d 200, 410 U.S. App. D.C. 87, 2014 WL 2135975, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 9586
CourtCourt of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
DecidedMay 23, 2014
Docket12-3094
StatusPublished
Cited by42 cases

This text of 753 F.3d 200 (United States v. Jacqueline Wheeler) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the D.C. 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. Jacqueline Wheeler, 753 F.3d 200, 410 U.S. App. D.C. 87, 2014 WL 2135975, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 9586 (D.C. Cir. 2014).

Opinion

GRIFFITH, Circuit Judge:

A jury found that Dr. Jacqueline Wheeler, the owner of a medical clinic in Washington, D.C., fraudulently collected millions of dollars from Medicaid for procedures that were never performed. The district court imposed a substantial prison sentence and ordered Wheeler to forfeit those funds. On appeal, Wheeler challenges both her conviction and sentence. We reject her arguments and affirm the district court.

I

Wheeler owned and managed the Health Advocacy Center, a clinic that treated Medicaid patients. Between January 2006 and April 2008, Wheeler, who was wholly responsible for all of the Center’s medical billing, submitted bills to Medicaid for more than $8 million in treatment allegedly provided. Medicaid paid the Center roughly $3.5 million on those bills, $3.1 million of which was for massage treatments.

Acting on a tip that the Center was cheating Medicaid, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services began an investigation in 2008. The FBI and Medicaid’s Fraud Control Unit soon joined the effort. Investigators easily concluded that many of the Center’s bills to Medicaid were false. For example, several bills claimed that the Center had given more than twenty-four hours of massage therapy to a single patient on a single day. Others reported hundreds of hours of massage therapy for days when only one therapist was on staff. Some sought payment for the treatment of patients hospitalized elsewhere.

An investigator visited the Center in late 2008, but Wheeler turned her away. The investigator threatened to return. That night, Wheeler called Acquinette Robinson, a Center employee, at 4:00 a.m. and asked for help moving files from the clinic to Wheeler’s home. Were the files not moved immediately, Wheeler warned her, all of the Center’s employees would soon lose their jobs. Robinson refused, and Wheeler moved the files herself. FBI agents obtained warrants and searched the Center and Wheeler’s home on February 18, 2009, seizing documents from both locations.

On May 13, 2011, a grand jury indicted Wheeler on one count of healthcare fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1347 and numerous counts of making false statements relating to healthcare matters under 18 U.S.C. § 1035. The primary battle during the eight-day trial that followed was waged over whether the billings submitted by Wheeler were intentionally false. The government sought to show that they were, asserting that Wheeler used her ill- *204 gotten gains to finance a lavish lifestyle, and highlighting her middle-of-the-night plea for help moving files in the wake of the rebuffed investigator’s threatened return. Wheeler, on the other hand, claimed that she had inadvertently inflated the Center’s bills for massage therapy fifteen-fold by misunderstanding Medicaid’s billing protocols. Those protocols measured time of treatment in units of fifteen minutes. Wheeler claimed that she thought each unit was a single minute, not fifteen. Stressing that the Center was poorly managed and disorganized, she asserted that her oversight of this detail was understandable.

The jury returned guilty verdicts against Wheeler on all counts. She moved for acquittal, arguing that the government had offered insufficient evidence of intent, and for a new trial, contending that some of the statements and argument at trial had impermissibly prejudiced her. The district court denied Wheeler’s motions and sentenced her to concurrent sentences of seventy-five months’ imprisonment on the healthcare fraud count and sixty months on the false statements counts. The court also ordered restitution to Medicaid of the approximately $3.1 million paid on bills for massage therapy.

Wheeler appeals, asserting various evi-dentiary and sentencing errors by the district court. We have jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and 18 U.S.C. § 3742.

II

Wheeler challenges four of the district court’s evidentiary rulings. We affirm each under an abuse of discretion standard. See United States v. Foster, 557 F.3d 650, 654-55 (D.C.Cir.2009) (evidentiary rulings are reviewed for abuse of discretion); United States v. Lin, 101 F.3d 760, 767-68 (D.C.Cir.1996).

A

Wheeler argues that the limitations the district court placed on the cross-examination of Health and Human Services investigator Latonya Coates violated the Confrontation Clause of the Sixth Amendment. We disagree.

On direct examination, Coates testified that she had reviewed all of the documents seized from the Center and Wheeler’s home and that none of them offered any support for the Medicaid bills listed in the indictment. Before beginning cross-examination, Wheeler’s counsel sought the admission of some of the seized documents called “superbills.” The record does not reveal who created the superbills or how they were named or used. Nevertheless, Wheeler’s counsel argued that the super-bills would show that there was support for the bills Wheeler had submitted. But it was not readily apparent to the court how the superbills, which were confusing on their face, were connected to these bills. The superbills were forms with “superbill” printed at the top. Below spaces for handwritten names and dates, there were printed acronyms, abbreviations, and phrases such as “NMS,” “ADL,” “Cryo,” and “Joint Mobilization.” On some of the su-perbills, handwritten numbers had been entered next to some of these acronyms, abbreviations, and phrases. The district court ruled that Wheeler’s counsel could use only those superbills that he could show were tied directly to the bills mentioned in the indictment.

On cross-examination, Coates confirmed that she had reviewed all of the seized files and stood by her testimony that she had seen no documents supporting the bills listed in the indictment. But then she went further, claiming that there was no support for any of the bills that the Center had submitted to Medicaid and not just *205 those referred to in the indictment. Seizing upon this expansion of her testimony, Wheeler’s lawyer asked the district court to remove the restriction it had placed on his cross-examination, presumably so that he could try to show that some of the superbills were related to Medicaid bills not listed in the indictment. The court refused on the ground that using the su-perbills might confuse the jury. In line with the cross-examination limitation that the district court had imposed, Wheeler’s lawyer showed Coates two superbills that bore the same dates as two of the Medicaid bills specified in the indictment and pointed out to her that some of the handwritten numbers on those superbills could be added together to equal the number of units of treatment billed to Medicaid for those days. Coates acknowledged the possibility that properly understood, the su-perbills might support the Medicaid bills, but that she could make no sense of them and found them highly confusing.

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Bluebook (online)
753 F.3d 200, 410 U.S. App. D.C. 87, 2014 WL 2135975, 2014 U.S. App. LEXIS 9586, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-jacqueline-wheeler-cadc-2014.