Background
Rolando Cifuentes-Lopez pleaded guilty to two counts of child sex trafficking involving two minor victims. The district court ordered him to pay restitution based on expert reports that aggregated the victims’ total losses from all abusers, including their mother and other traffickers. The government argued for joint and several liability or apportionment based on sentence length, but the expert witnesses could not link specific losses to Cifuentes-Lopez’s conduct alone.
The court’s reasoning
The court applied the but-for causation standard established in United States v. Anthony I and Anthony II. It found that the government failed to present evidence showing the victims would not have suffered the claimed losses had they never encountered Cifuentes-Lopez. The expert reports lumped together harms from multiple perpetrators and did not differentiate the losses caused by the defendant from those caused by others. The court rejected the government’s argument that the district court’s apportionment scheme cured the evidentiary defect, noting that apportionment requires a threshold finding of direct causation first.
The government must show that, but for the defendant’s conduct, the victim would not have suffered those losses.
Anthony II, 22 F.4th at 950
What it means going forward
Defendants in child sex trafficking cases involving multiple perpetrators now face a heightened burden for restitution awards. The government must isolate the specific losses caused by the defendant rather than relying on aggregate trauma assessments or sentence-length apportionment.
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