United States v. Mary Mendoza

Summary

The court affirmed Mendoza’s convictions and sentence, rejecting her challenges to the admission of a victim’s remote deposition, the sufficiency of the wire-fraud evidence, her presence at sentencing, and the upward sentence imposed above the Guidelines range. The court held that Mendoza waived her Confrontation Clause and sentencing-presence objections, that the evidence permitted the jury to find an interstate wire, and that any error in the upward departure was harmless because the same reasonable sentence would have been imposed as a variance. The consolidated opinion also rejected Hicks’s challenges to his waiver of counsel and the absence of a sua sponte competency evaluation.