United States v. Wells

Wendy Lois Wells (defendant) worked as a substitute teacher. While working at a school, she searched the desks of teachers for whom she was substituting and found and stole their personal information and social-security numbers. Wells committed identity theft by obtaining credit cards in the teachers’ names and making fraudulent purchases using the cards. Wells was convicted of mail fraud and the unauthorized use of a social-security number. Two of the teachers affected by Wells’s scheme submitted letters to the court detailing months of effort, hundreds of letters and phone calls to banks, law enforcement, and merchants, missed work, and other impacts to them from Wells’s stealing their identities. These included long-term effects on their ability to obtain credit and use their existing credit cards, which meant they had to carry cash in case merchants rejected their credit cards. They also carried affidavits explaining the situation to avoid arrest if merchants called police due to suspected forgery. The court filed these letters in the record, and the United States asked for an upward departure to Wells’s sentence based on the content of the letters and to address the victims’ nonmonetary losses in addition to the financial losses to the merchants Wells defrauded. The court granted the request, sentencing Wells to 30 months in prison, which was three months beyond the statutory maximum of 27 months. Wells appealed.