United States v. Ossai

485 F.3d 25, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 9293, 2007 WL 1191139
CourtCourt of Appeals for the First Circuit
DecidedApril 24, 2007
Docket06-1634
StatusPublished
Cited by19 cases

This text of 485 F.3d 25 (United States v. Ossai) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the First 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. Ossai, 485 F.3d 25, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 9293, 2007 WL 1191139 (1st Cir. 2007).

Opinion

CYR, Senior Circuit Judge.

Ugoehukwu Ossai appeals from the judgment of conviction and sentence imposed by the district court pursuant to the Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951(a), for committing and conspiring to commit robbery. We affirm.

I

BACKGROUND

On December 29, 2004, two Dunkin Donuts employees — Justin Cassidy and John Chick — were at their workplace in Bed-ford, New Hampshire. At approximately 6:00 p.m., Cassidy went out to the parking lot and met defendant Ugoehukwu Ossai and Ossai’s girlfriend, Chanrathana Khem (also a Dunkin Donuts employee), who were parked in a Volkswagen Jetta. Ossai told Cassidy that he planned to rob the Dunkin Donuts later that evening, showed Cassidy a gun, and asked whether Cassidy wanted to participate in the robbery. Cas-sidy then returned to the store.

At around 7:15 p.m., while occupied on the telephone, Chick noticed that the side *27 door of the store was open. Chick looked outside and saw a Jetta parked with a female driver matching Khem’s description. When Chick returned to the store to resume his phone call, he saw a person wearing a ski mask (viz., Ossai) enter through the side door, carrying a handgun. Ossai ordered Chick to lay down on the floor. When Chick knelt instead, Ossai placed his hand and the gun at the back of Chick’s neck, and stated: “I do not want to hurt you.” Meanwhile, Ossai had passed Cassidy a pillowcase, into which Cassidy emptied $782 from the cash registers. Os-sai fled.

When the police arrived at the store, Chick informed them that he had recognized the robber’s voice, and that based on Ossai’s frequent visits and phone calls to Khem while she was working at the store, he believed that Ossai was the robber. Manager April Pena, who returned to the store after the robbery, told the police that she had been so busy during the morning shift that she had forgotten to insert a new videotape into the store’s surveillance system that day. Consequently the tape in the machine would have stopped recording at noontime. Manager Pena and Officer Paul Roy reviewed the tape, which bore a date and time stamp on each frame, and confirmed that the last recordings occurred shortly before noon that day. Accordingly, Pena and Officer Roy concluded that there was no videotape recording of the robbery. Although Pena thought she had given the tape to Officer Roy, Roy testified that he did not receive it.

Within an hour of the robbery, the police stopped and arrested Ossai, who was subsequently indicted on one robbery count under the Hobbs Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1951(a), and one conspiracy count. 1 The district court denied Ossai’s pretrial motion to dismiss the indictment, which was based on the government’s putative loss or destruction of the store’s video surveillance tape. Following a three-day jury trial, Ossai was convicted on both counts.

At sentencing, the district court increased the base offense level by two points due to the fact that Ossai had “physically restrained” his victim, John Chick. Although 87 months was the prescribed maximum sentence within the applicable guideline sentencing range (GSR), the district court imposed a 100-month sentence, citing inter alia, Ossai’s extensive history of violent and anti-social behavior. Ossai now appeals from the final judgment of conviction and sentence.

II

DISCUSSION

A. The Missing Surveillance Tape

Ossai first challenges the disallowance of the motion to dismiss the indictment due to the alleged destruction or loss of the store surveillance tape by the government. As noted, store manager April Pena testified (i) that she had forgotten to put a new twenty-four-hour tape in the store’s surveillance system at noon on the day of the robbery, and upon entering the office after the robbery she immediately noticed that the orange light on the system was off (indicating that the system was not recording), and (ii) that Captain Roy and she replayed the last fifteen minutes of the *28 tape in the machine, and determined that it contained video of the restaurant only up to noontime on December 29.

Ossai does not contend that the missing tape is exculpatory in the sense that it would establish that someone else committed the robbery. Rather, Ossai concedes that the government adduced overwhelming evidence that he committed the robbery. Instead, as he contended at trial, Ossai argues that the government could not charge him under the Hobbs Act, given that both Cassidy and Chick were complicit in the robbery, thus he employed neither “actual force [n]or threatened force” in taking the money from Chick. See United States v. Skowronski, 968 F.2d 242, 248 (2d Cir.1992). 2 Ossai maintains that Chick, as the shift supervisor, possessed a key to the locked office where the video surveillance equipment was kept, that he could have tampered with the surveillance tapes in order to conceal his and Cassidy’s participation in the “inside” theft, and that the missing tape might have exhibited signs that Chick had stopped or rewound the tape in order to prevent its recordation of the activities in the store at the time of the supposed “robbery.”

A defendant who asserts a due process claim based on the government’s failure to preserve evidence “must show that the government, in failing to preserve the evidence, (1) acted in bad faith when it destroyed evidence, which (2) possessed an apparent exculpatory value and, which (3) is to some extent irreplaceable. Thus in missing evidence cases, the presence or absence of good or bad faith by the government will be dispositive.” United States v. Femia, 9 F.3d 990, 993-94 (1st Cir.1993) (citing California v. Trombetta, 467 U.S. 479, 488-89, 104 S.Ct. 2528, 81 L.Ed.2d 413 (1984)); see United States v. Marshall, 109 F.3d 94, 98 (1st Cir.1997) (noting that defendant bears the burden of proof on a Femia motion). The district court denied the Ossai motion, crediting the testimony by Pena and Captain Roy that Pena had forgotten to insert a new tape in the recorder at noon on December 29, and that they reviewed the date-and-time stamped tape after the robbery and determined that it ceased recording shortly after noon on December 29, some seven hours before the robbery.

We review conclusions of law de novo, whereas subsidiary findings of fact 0e.g., whether the police acted in bad faith) are reviewed only for clear error. See United States v. Garza, 435 F.3d 73, 75 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, — U.S. -, 126 S.Ct. 2313, 164 L.Ed.2d 832 (2006).

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Bluebook (online)
485 F.3d 25, 2007 U.S. App. LEXIS 9293, 2007 WL 1191139, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-ossai-ca1-2007.