United States v. Thomas Staniforth

971 F.2d 1355, 1992 WL 191084
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedOctober 29, 1992
Docket91-3325
StatusPublished
Cited by19 cases

This text of 971 F.2d 1355 (United States v. Thomas Staniforth) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh 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. Thomas Staniforth, 971 F.2d 1355, 1992 WL 191084 (7th Cir. 1992).

Opinions

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

At the end of a four-day trial, a jury convicted Dr. Thomas Staniforth, a dentist in the town of Wisconsin Rapids, of three counts of making false statements for the purpose of influencing a federally insured bank, the Community State Bank of Wisconsin Rapids, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1014. The judge gave him concurrent prison sentences of eight months.

Staniforth was a long-term customer of the bank and a personal friend of its chief executive officer, Norbert Brunner. As is common with small banks, the bank’s procedures were often informal. In July 1986 Staniforth had a loan outstanding from the bank of $36,000 (we round all dollar figures to the nearest thousand). Brunner called him one day to tell him it was time to renew the loan and the bank would therefore need a new financial statement. Sta-niforth came over to the bank on his lunch hour. The two met for about a quarter of an hour. Brunner asked Staniforth questions and used the answers to complete a form entitled “Individual Financial Statement,” which Staniforth then signed. Brunner asked Staniforth whether he owned any stock and when Staniforth answered that he owned 50,700 shares of common stock of Possis Corporation (a manufacturer of medical devices) Brunner looked up the stock in the Wall Street Journal, computed the total market value of Staniforth’s shares, and wrote down the figure ($1,216,000) in the assets column on the financial statement. This turned out to be roughly 90 percent of the total assets listed in the statement. When asked about liabilities Staniforth mentioned only the $36,000 note payable to the bank — the note he was renewing. As a result, his net [1357]*1357worth as listed in the statement exceeded $1.3 million. The loan was renewed.

Staniforth had neglected to tell Brunner that the stock had been purchased on margin and that he owed his broker approximately $550,000; and Count I of the indictment alleges that Staniforth knowingly failed to disclose his full liabilities in order to influence the bank to renew the loan. His defense was that he had not thought he had to disclose the debt to the broker, because Brunner did not ask him whether he had purchased the stock on margin. This is weak but it may have disturbed the prosecution sufficiently to make it shift ground and argue to the jury that Stani-forth had exaggerated the value of his stock interest by failing to disclose that he was not the full owner of the stock but merely the owner of the equity interest in it, that is, the difference between the market value and the debt to the broker. If the jury believed this it would not have to worry about Staniforth’s failure to disclose the debt; the false statement would have been his answer to Brunner’s question whether he owned any stock that he owned all 50,700 shares, when in fact he owned just his equity in them.

If this is what the government did, then Staniforth is correct that it amended the indictment and the conviction must be reversed. In the federal system, if you are indicted for X, you cannot be convicted of Y (unless it is a lesser included offense of X) because that would deny you your right not to be charged with a federal crime other than by a grand jury. Stirone v. United States, 361 U.S. 212, 217, 80 S.Ct. 270, 273, 4 L.Ed.2d 252 (1960); Schmuck v. United States, 489 U.S. 705, 719, 109 S.Ct. 1443, 1452, 103 L.Ed.2d 734 (1989); United States v. McAnderson, 914 F.2d 934, 944-45 (7th Cir.1990); United States v. Adams, 778 F.2d 1117, 1122-25 (5th Cir.1985). Sta-niforth would also be correct that no reasonable jury could have found him guilty of falsely representing the value of his shares of Possis stock. They were worth the market value times the number of shares that he owned. If you own a house worth $250,000 and have a mortgage on it with an unpaid balance of $175,000, you are the “full” owner of an asset worth $250,000, and you should list $250,000 under assets and $175,000 under liabilities — not, as the government unguardedly suggested at the argument of this appeal, $75,000 under assets. That would be nonsense, as shown by the fact that the financial-statement form that Staniforth signed lists “real estate mortgages” in the liabilities column. If in our hypothetical case the homeowner were required to list the value of his house as $75,000 and his real estate mortgage as $175,000, his net worth (assuming no other assets or liabilities), would be —$100,000, rather than +$75,000.

We are distressed by the government’s equivocations and confusions over this elementary accounting convention. But we do not think it infected the trial of Count I with fatal error. At trial the government, while mistakenly urging that Staniforth did not own all the stock, did not argue that therefore he had made a false entry in the asset column of his financial statement. Instead the government argued, correctly, that by failing to disclose that he had purchased the stock on margin and owed the brokerage firm a considerable sum, Staniforth had overstated his net worth. It was in this connection that the government brought out the difference between ownership and equity.

Staniforth argues that his failure to disclose his total liabilities was immaterial because even if his net worth was only half of what he represented it to be, it greatly exceeded the modest loan that he was seeking to renew. The word “material” does not appear in section 1014 and, as an original matter, one might have supposed that the omission was deliberate. Section 1014 is a criminal statute and many criminal statutes place greater emphasis on the character of the defendant’s act (including the intent behind it) than on the consequences. On the assumption that the omission of the “material” from the statute was deliberate, all that would be required of the government was proof that the defendant intended to influence the bank, although the materiality of his statement would [1358]*1358come in by the back door because, the less material the statement was, the less likely it was to have been made for the purpose of influencing the bank, rather than out of sheer forgetfulness, carelessness, or confusion. If an assistant U.S. attorney doesn’t know what an asset is, why should a dentist be expected to know what a liability is?

The courts nevertheless have held that materiality, defined as being capable of influencing the bank, is an element of the offense under section 1014. United, States v. Shriver, 842 F.2d 968, 976-77 (7th Cir.1988); United States v. Henderson, 645 F.2d 569, 575 (7th Cir.1981); United States v. Braverman, 522 F.2d 218, 223 (7th Cir.1975); United States v. Key, 859 F.2d 1257, 1261 (7th Cir.1988) (dictum); United States v. Haddock,

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United States v. Thomas Staniforth
971 F.2d 1355 (Seventh Circuit, 1992)

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Bluebook (online)
971 F.2d 1355, 1992 WL 191084, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-thomas-staniforth-ca7-1992.