United States of America v. Randolph Jay Forrest

United States Court of Appeals
For the Eighth Circuit
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No. 24-1827
___________________________
United States of America
Plaintiff - Appellee
v.
Randolph Jay Forrest
Defendant - Appellant
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Appeal from United States District Court
for the Northern District of Iowa - Eastern
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Submitted: April 15, 2025
Filed: September 2, 2025
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Before ERICKSON, ARNOLD, and STRAS, Circuit Judges.
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ERICKSON, Circuit Judge.
Randolph Jay Forrest pled guilty to one count of wire fraud, in violation of 18
U.S.C. § 1343, admitting he and his co-conspirators rolled back odometers on used
cars. The district court1 ordered Forrest to pay $140,178.56 in restitution. Forrest
1 The Honorable C.J. Williams, Chief Judge, United States District Court for
the Northern District of Iowa.

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appeals, asserting the district court clearly erred when it adopted the government’s
calculation, which Forrest contends was based on a novel, untested, and unproved
methodology. Because the district court did not abuse its discretion, we affirm.
I. BACKGROUND
From 2012 to 2021, Forrest worked at a used car dealership in Iowa. He and
the dealership’s owners rolled back odometers on dozens of vehicles, altered the
vehicles’ titles, and resold them without disclosing the true mileage. After the
scheme was uncovered, Forrest was indicted on five counts of odometer tampering,
four counts of mail fraud, and four counts of wire fraud.
Forrest pled guilty to a single count of wire fraud pursuant to a plea agreement
in which he agreed to pay full restitution to all victims, including statutory victims
and persons directly and proximately harmed as a result of relevant conduct as
determined by the court at sentencing. See 18 U.S.C. § 3663A. In a signed
stipulation of facts, Forrest acknowledged that he personally requested odometer
recalibrations on at least 27 vehicles. Seventeen of the vehicles were identified in a
chart in the PSIR, two were rolled back by around 80,000 miles, others in the 10,000
to 30,000 range, for an average of about 47,000 each. With no agreement reached
on the amount of loss or restitution, the district court was presented with several
options at sentencing.
One methodology was proffered by Forrest’s expert, Randall McCathren.
McCathren opined that because the effect of an odometer rollback is highly
dependent on the vehicle’s age, condition, and initial mileage, the appropriate
approach was to assume an average condition of the vehicle and determine an
average value by relying on sources such as the Kelley Blue Book and Hearst’s
Black Book. Using that method, McCathren found the fraud amount caused by the
odometer rollback averaged about $810 per vehicle for a total loss amount of
$38,070.

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Another methodology was suggested by the pretrial services and probation
office in the Presentence Investigation Report (“PSIR”). This calculation applied a
40% loss valuation approved by the Fifth Circuit in United States v. Whitlow, 979
F.2d 1008 (5th Cir. 1992). Under this approach, the loss in this case amounted to
$76,690.
The government proposed a third option, which was to calculate the loss by
totaling the price each victim paid for their altered vehicle. The sum of the purchase
prices of the 47 vehicles was $180,299. Another proposal was to impose restitution
in the amount of $116,334. This figure represented the co-conspirators’ estimated
profit, which was arrived at by totaling the difference between the price the
dealership paid for a car and the price a victim paid to purchase the car. The other
option presented to the district court was from Howard Nusbaum, an expert retained
by the government. Nusbaum disagreed with McCathren’s calculation because it
failed to account for the effect the branded title had on the value of the vehicles in
question. Nusbaum assessed the diminished value of a vehicle by calculating the
value as misrepresented against the actual remaining service life of the vehicle if it
had been truthfully represented.
Nusbaum’s approach assumed the average driver expected to get
approximately 150,000 miles of use from a vehicle. If a vehicle had already
exceeded that number, Nusbaum adjusted that expectation upward because a
purchaser would not buy a car that he or she believed had no useful life left.
Nusbaum compared the estimate of a vehicle’s anticipated life with its true mileage.
In his calculations, a vehicle with a significant rollback such that an informed buyer
should have expected immediate failure retained no value. For vehicles with a useful
life, Nusbaum calculated a percentage. For instance, if a purchaser received a car
with only 40 percent of its represented useful life, Nusbaum estimated the loss at 60
percent of the vehicle’s purchase price. Using this method, he estimated the total
loss at $140,178.55.

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The district court rejected the approach used by the Fifth Circuit in Whitlow
because it did not account for the branded title affixed to a vehicle involved in a
rollback. The court rejected McCathren’s calculation for this same reason—the
Kelley Blue Book and Hearst’s Black Book values assume the title and mileage on
the vehicle are valid. The district court noted that in many ways the loss should be
the entire purchase price because the victims would not have bought the car in the
first place had they known the vehicles had rolled back mileage. But, because the
buyer got something of value, the district court found some consideration to value
must be factored into the analysis. Given there were at least 47 vehicles identified
in the scheme, the court found the collection of specific data and underlying
information from witnesses to calculate an exact loss amount for each vehicle would
be “cost prohibitive and logistically unrealistic.”
The district court set forth several reasons for its decision to rely on
Nusbaum’s calculations, including: (1) he was an “eminently qualified” expert in
vehicles, specifically in rollback schemes and the impact on the market; (2) the
assumptions underlying his calculations were reasonable; and (3) his methodology
was reasonable. The court expressly rejected Forrest’s assertions that the purchase
prices listed in the government’s exhibit, and relied on by Nusbaum, were unreliable
such that the actual price paid by the victims was unknown or the dealership might
have made improvements to the vehicles that would increase their value. In rejecting
these arguments, the court noted the business model utilized by the co-conspirators
was to obtain vehicles with high mileage, roll back the odometers, and flip them as
quickly as possible, with cleaning being the only likely change to the vehicle prior
to the sale. The court further found the purchase prices listed by the government
likely understated the actual amount of money paid to the co-conspirators because
part of the scheme was to underreport the purchase price and take money under the
table so the buyers could reduce the amount of taxes they had to pay for the car.
On appeal, Forrest contends the district court clearly erred when it adopted
Nusbaum’s methodology that lacked sufficient individualization and did not provide
“any credit for actual, measurable value that most purchasers enjoyed and retain[ed],

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despite their vehicles having inaccurate odometer clusters.” Forrest asserts some, if
not many, of the vehicles are still currently on the road and even non-working
vehicles have value for trade, parts, salvage, materials, etc. Forrest claims the district
court awarded 32 of the 47 victims a clear windfall and the remaining purchasers
will be reimbursed at a high rate of 36% of their combined total purchase price.
II. DISCUSSION
We review restitution awards for abuse of discretion and factual findings
supporting the amount for clear error. United States v. Nelson, 106 F.4th 719, 724
(8th Cir. 2024). No clear error exists if the determination is plausible in light of the
entire record. Id.
It is the government’s burden to prove by a preponderance of the evidence the
victims’ losses. United States v. Ruff, 420 F.3d 772, 775 (8th Cir. 2005). In fraud
cases, “courts must be wary of over-inclusiveness” when determining actual loss.
United States v. Hansmeier, 988 F.3d 428, 440 (8th Cir. 2021). “Restitution ‘must
be based on the amount of loss actually caused by the defendant’s offense,’ and the
burden is on the government to ‘prove that the restitution awarded does not exceed
the actual, provable loss caused by the offense.’” Id. (quoting United States v.
Fonseca, 790 F.3d 852, 854 (8th Cir. 2015)). On the other hand, the defendant bears
the burden of showing financial resources and needs. Ruff, 420 F.3d at 775. The
burden as to all other matters “shall be upon the party designated by the court as
justice requires.” Id. at 776 (quoting 18 U.S.C. § 3664(e)).
While Forrest contends the district court’s restitution award was insufficiently
individualized, a district court is obligated only to reasonably estimate the loss
“when the amount lost through fraud is difficult to estimate.” United States v.
Garbacz, 33 F.4th 459, 473 (8th Cir. 2022) (quoting United States v. Adejumo, 848
F.3d 868, 870 (8th Cir. 2017)). This principle does not allow a court to overstate a
victim’s loss simply because determining the loss is complicated due to the complex

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nature of the scheme. In every case, restitution awards are “limited to the victim’s
provable actual loss.” Id.
Here, Forrest stipulated to pay restitution for the full amount of the victims’
losses, including offenses dismissed as a result of the plea agreement and any
uncharged offenses that were part of this scheme. Due to the number of vehicles
involved, the court found that obtaining all the records and documentation regarding
a vehicle’s current location and condition, repair bills incurred by the victims, and
subsequent sales made a precise loss calculation infeasible. Thus, each party was
given an opportunity to present evidence and arguments on the amount of provable
loss. Cf. United States v. Sutton, 520 F.3d 1259, 1264 (10th Cir. 2008) (collecting
cases and observing “there is simply more than one permissible way to measure loss
in criminal odometer tampering cases”).
After receiving conflicting evidence, the district court noted the vehicles’ fair
market value, now with a branded title, was diminished to the point that it would not
be unreasonable to assess the loss at the purchase prices. It did not do so. The
district court recognized that the vehicles, although marred with a branded title, may
have some value, although not the value provided for in the calculations that were
based on assumptions of valid title and mileage. While Forrest believes more weight
should have been given to the remaining useful life of the vehicles, he ignores the
notion that the loss calculation did not account for other losses that could have been
attributed to his conduct, including towing bills for broken down cars and other
unexpected repair bills due to the misrepresentation of the vehicle’s mileage. In
some cases, the court noted the victim could have ended up losing more money than
the purchase price.
The dissent suggests unexpected repairs are simply an accelerated expense,
rather than an expense buyers might otherwise have avoided. However, Nusbaum
testified the cars in Forrest’s scheme were probably purchased from individuals who
held them until they became inoperable or prohibitively expensive to repair. The
district court also concluded that a cleaning was likely the only change to the

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vehicles prior to sale. As a result, the buyers in the scheme were not necessarily
faced with routine repairs on an unexpected schedule. Rather, they faced
prohibitively expensive repairs of the sort that would convince an ordinary person
to give up on their vehicle—or, in the victims’ case, to refrain from purchasing it.
That some victims could have spent more on repairs and related expenses than they
paid to purchase their vehicle supported the court’s conclusion “that the restitution
awarded [did] not exceed the actual, provable loss caused by the offense.”
Hansmeier, 988 F.3d at 440 (citation omitted).
The district court’s findings with respect to the nature of Forrest’s scheme
reinforce the point. At the urging of Forrest and his co-conspirators, buyers agreed
to underrepresent the purchase price of their vehicle to the state in which they
registered it. For example, the district court reviewed evidence that one buyer paid
$4,000 cash for his vehicle and yet received a receipt stating the car had been
purchased for $1,500. The same buyer submitted evidence that he later incurred
$3,500 in repair costs. The district court found this sort of underreporting was part
of the scheme and, as a result, the government’s figures likely understated the
amount paid by the victims to Forrest and the dealership.
Forrest also contends the district court ignored the value of the vehicles for
trade, parts, salvage, or other materials. His contention is unpersuasive for two
reasons.
First, salvage value is a type of resale value, and the district court concluded
loss estimates based on resale value were a poor fit for this case when it adopted
Nusbaum’s estimate. Nusbaum testified his estimate turned on use rather than resale
value because the victims in Forrest’s scheme were unique: they sought cheap, high
mileage cars and did not plan to resell those cars. Because they planned to drive
their cars as long as possible, they paid for and negotiated use value—without any
expectation they might recoup a portion of their investment by reselling their
vehicle. Forrest did not offer evidence to undermine the district court’s conclusion
that use value, not resale value, was the best measure of his victims’ losses.

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Second, the salvage value or the value of component car parts is not self-
evident. Forrest had the burden to demonstrate his theory of value fit the facts of his
case. Although the government must prove the victims’ losses by a preponderance
of the evidence, the court may allocate the burden of proof as to all other matters.
Ruff, 420 F.3d at 775–76. The district court offered Forrest and the government an
opportunity to litigate the appropriate amount of loss. Forrest took that opportunity,
but he did not present evidence of salvage and parts value. He did not attempt to
rebut the government’s theory that use value was the best measure of his victims’
losses, either. As the proponent of a rival theory of value, Forrest bore the burden
to demonstrate his method was correct and support his demonstration with evidence.
See United States v. Arrington, 97 F.4th 593, 596 (8th Cir. 2024) (noting that seven
circuits place the burden of proving an offset on the defendant and permitting the
court to assign the burden to the defendant). Without supporting evidence, the
district court had neither a basis nor an obligation to speculate about the impact of
salvage or parts value. We cannot conclude the district court clearly erred based on
Forrest’s speculation. See id. (concluding the defendant “presented sufficient
evidence to establish” a claimed offset); United States v. Karie, 976 F.3d 800, 806
(8th Cir. 2020) (defendant presented no evidence to support his offset theory).
We recognize the loss amount calculated in this case is relatively close to the
sum of the purchase amounts listed in the government’s exhibit; however, part of the
scheme, as found by the district court, was to conceal the actual purchase price by
accepting money on the side and underrepresenting the purchase price to allow the
purchaser to pay less in taxes. Thus, the difference between the loss amount as found
by the district court and the total amount paid by the buyers is likely greater.
Moreover, in other circumstances, a sentencing court may need to consider some of
the details missing in this case, such as an estimate that accounts for salvage value.
See Karie, 976 F.3d at 805. But the record here is devoid of such evidence. Forrest
has not provided a convincing reason demonstrating that the district court’s findings
were clearly erroneous, or that the district court abused its discretion when it
estimated the loss involved in this odometer tampering scheme.

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III. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, we affirm the judgment of the district court.
ARNOLD, Circuit Judge, dissenting.
Because I cannot endorse the economic theory that underpins the district
court’s restitution award, I respectfully dissent. Randolph Forrest participated in an
odometer tampering scheme, and the district court purported to credit him with the
value of the vehicles that he and his coconspirators sold in determining the restitution
that he had to pay for his victims’ losses. But it calculated the after-credit losses by
adopting the government’s model treating nearly seventy percent of those vehicles
as worthless. It takes no special insight to realize that cannot be right. Automobiles
have value; everyone knows that. See Vogt v. Progressive Cas. Ins. Co., 129 F.4th
1071, 1073 (8th Cir. 2025). The best the court can say for the model is that it might
be less wrong than it seems. But there is no need to rationalize a valuation the record
does not support, no matter how difficult it may be to estimate what Forrest’s victims
lost. The district court had options to simplify the problem and reach a defensible
estimate, either by shifting the burden of proving the credit to Forrest or by denying
restitution if calculating the amount lost turned out to be too complex. See 18 U.S.C.
§§ 3663A(c)(3), 3664(e). I would vacate the restitution award and remand to let it
consider those options.
As the court and the parties do, I assume that the restitution award should have
equaled the net losses suffered by Forrest’s victims after accounting for the value of
the vehicles that they received. Cf. Robers v. United States, 572 U.S. 639, 640–45
(2014). On that assumption, the district court had to make a reasonable estimate of
the victims’ net losses, see United States v. Adejumo, 848 F.3d 868, 870 (8th Cir.
2017), and the government bore the burden to “prove that the restitution awarded
[did] not exceed the actual, provable loss caused by the offense.” See United States
v. Hansmeier, 988 F.3d 428, 440 (8th Cir. 2021).

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The government fell well short of carrying that burden. Its unique restitution
model, never before used in litigation, produced results that were unreasonable on
their face. Here is how it worked. First, the government’s expert assumed that
victims expected their vehicles to last about 150,000 miles, or occasionally a little
longer. Then, he subtracted each vehicle’s advertised mileage from its expected
mileage to estimate how many miles the victim who purchased it thought it would
have left. He also subtracted an estimate of each vehicle’s actual mileage from its
expected mileage to estimate how many miles it actually had left. The ratio between
actual remaining mileage and anticipated remaining mileage was the fulcrum of the
model. It represented the percentage of the mileage a victim thought he was
purchasing that he purportedly received. To determine the value of a vehicle, the
expert multiplied this percentage by an estimate of the vehicle’s purchase price. If
the value was negative, he set it to zero. All the expert had to do to transform his
calculation of value into an estimate of a victim’s loss was subtract it from the
estimate of the purchase price.
When the expert performed these steps, the model told him that nearly seventy
percent of the vehicles had zero value, a clear sign that the model made no sense.
Even vehicles in poor condition have some value as salvage. See Vogt, 129 F.4th
at 1073. The model just assumed that they did not. All value had to come from
remaining mileage, or the model did not count it.
To make matters worse, the model was doing no better in valuing mileage. It
said that none of the zero-value vehicles could run another mile, which was
demonstrably untrue because the victims were driving away in them. The mistake
behind this error was the more or less arbitrary assumption that vehicles would only
run for about 150,000 miles in their lifetimes. If a vehicle had already accrued more
than the expected lifetime mileage when a victim drove off in it, the model assumed
it could not run at all and treated it as worthless, regardless of what the evidence
showed.

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Even the expert who designed the model did not think that was right. At least
not really. The expert departed from the 150,000-mile assumption when Forrest or
his coconspirators advertised that a vehicle had close to or more than 150,000 miles.
He reasoned that the vehicle was “better than normal” and might “go to 170,000
miles” or more. In other words, the probability that a vehicle would run for a given
number of miles depended on the number of miles it had already run. If a vehicle
exceeded its expected lifetime mileage before a victim bought it and drove away in
it, the expectation needed to change. Considering its track record, the vehicle might
keep running, as some or all of the vehicles did. The model, however, largely failed
to account for this additional mileage because the expert only adjusted vehicles’
expected lifetime mileages when their advertised mileages bumped up against them.
When vehicles’ advertised mileages were lower but their actual mileages surpassed
their expected lifetime mileages, the expert ignored his own reasoning and assumed
that the vehicles would not work. Setting aside salvage value, that is precisely the
error that made the model treat so many vehicles as worthless.
The model’s inconsistency is all the more indefensible because the victims
themselves offered evidence that the vehicles they purchased ran and had value.
Most of the victims who provided evidence stated that their vehicles were drivable,
either without problems or with repairs. The rest did not include vehicle troubles
among the losses they suffered. And all but one of the victims who claimed
restitution of specific loss amounts asked for less than the full purchase prices of
their vehicles, which means that they did not believe that their vehicles had zero
value. Yet the model treated even these victims’ vehicles as worthless merely
because they exceeded expected lifetime mileages that the government’s expert
failed to adjust properly. As a result, the victims in this group recovered the full
purchase prices, costing Forrest over $6,000 in restitution that the victims never
requested. In fact, if the district court had taken every vehicle that the model deemed
worthless and valued it at the lowest price any of these victims implicitly admitted
their vehicles were worth, it would have shaved about $20,000 off Forrest’s
restitution obligation.

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In short, as one of the government investigators himself conceded, “all the
victims in this case [got] something of value”; the government’s model just
pretended that a large majority of them did not. That is not a reasonable way of
estimating the victims’ net losses.
The court suggests that the victims might nevertheless have suffered
unexpected repair costs that counterbalanced some of the value they got from their
vehicles. Maybe so, but not much of it. Vehicles need repairs as they accumulate
mileage. This was no secret to the victims; only the mileage of their vehicles was.
That means that an unexpected repair would generally be a repair that a victim
expected to make later but instead had to make earlier because his vehicle had more
mileage than he thought. Even if the repair were costly or clustered with other
repairs, the loss to the victim would still only be the cost of accelerating the expense
and not the full cost of the repair. Think of it like losing some interest on the
expended amount rather than losing the amount itself, which the victim would have
to expend on the repair later anyway.
The court may be right that prospective repair costs would have deterred some
victims from purchasing their vehicles if they had known the vehicles’ true mileages,
but that is beside the point. The vehicles had value, and the victims retained them,
yet the district court compensated the victims as if they had not. That was a windfall
regardless of whether odometer tampering induced the victims to purchase the
vehicles. See United States v. Allen, 529 F.3d 390, 395–97 (7th Cir. 2008). If victims
could obtain this sort of bonus recovery simply because they entered transactions
due to fraud, actual loss would no longer be a limit on restitution awards in most
fraud cases. Few victims would deal at a price inflated by fraud unless they were
unable to obtain a better price elsewhere. Just consider the investor who thought he
was buying a business but only got a business license (and a van), see United States
v. Matsumaru, 244 F.3d 1092, 1109 (9th Cir. 2001), the tribe that thought it was
paying for mold testing by an expert but received services from someone less
qualified, see Allen, 529 F.3d at 391–92, 395–97, the man who thought he was
lending on the security of a car and tools but could only recover the tools because

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the borrower secretly pledged the car to other lenders, see United States v. Williams,
292 F.3d 681, 684, 689 (10th Cir. 2002), and the military base that thought it was
buying goods and services but only received some of them, see United States v. Huff,
609 F.3d 1240, 1244, 1248–49 (11th Cir. 2010)—none of whom could previously
recover the sort of windfall that the district court allowed here.
It does not matter that gross repair costs and similar expenses might have
exceeded purchase prices. The high costs of operating a vehicle, assuming they were
indeed high, did not negate the vehicle’s value. That would be a little like saying a
printer is worthless because the cost of replacing its ink cartridges exceeds its
purchase price. It does not account for the benefits the product provides.
And it is far from clear that gross repair and similar costs outweighed the
vehicles’ benefits, in use and in salvage, just because those costs might have been
greater than the vehicles’ purchase prices. One reason is that a rational vehicle owner
would not pay to repair and operate a vehicle if the benefits of operating the repaired
vehicle were less than the costs of doing so. Another is that gross costs include costs
that the vehicle owner expected, like the costs of future repairs before adjusting for
their acceleration. If these costs exceeded the vehicle’s benefits, the owner would
not have bought the vehicle. All that matters is the residuum of unexpected costs,
and those are unknown.
That points the way to a larger problem. Whatever the victims’ unexpected
repair and similar costs might have been, the notion that they balanced out the values
of the victims’ vehicles is speculative. So far as the record reveals, no victim had to
pay for repairs he did not expect. The government’s expert expressly declined to
model such repairs “because no evidence was presented to” him that they occurred.
And assuming it is relevant, the possibility that vehicle repair costs exceeded vehicle
purchase prices is, as the court acknowledges, merely something that “could have”
happened. The record does not even contain a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how
often unexpected repairs might be necessary and what they might cost given these
uncertainties. For other unexpected costs, the story is much the same. That the expert

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may have underestimated some victims’ losses because they underreported their
purchase prices does little to fill the void in the record; the expert himself testified
that he could not account for underreported prices because they were insufficiently
substantiated. Without evidence for the balancing theory, the argument boils down
to this: if the government’s model had measured what it did not measure, the result
would compensate for the obvious errors in what it did measure. Everything would
supposedly cancel out—at least well enough.
With respect, the court’s attempt to cast doubt on the salvage value of the
victims’ vehicles in defense of this conclusion is also unsuccessful. The court
dismisses the vehicles’ salvage value as the product of Forrest’s speculation. But the
fact that the vehicles had such value is indisputable even though its magnitude was
uncertain. And it makes no difference whether the salvage value was “a type of resale
value” as the court says. The court’s paraphrase notwithstanding, the government’s
expert did not conclude that the victims bought their vehicles “without any
expectation they might recoup a portion of their investment by reselling” them. It
would not matter if he did since the vehicles had salvage value whether or not the
victims expected to extract it at the time of purchase. But the expert only questioned
whether victims would resell their vehicles in typical transactions since he suspected
that they would drive the vehicles until they died. At that point, he opined, they
would dispose of the vehicles. Nothing in his testimony implied that they would
dispose of them without recovering their salvage value or explained why they would
take such an irrational course.
More fundamentally, the focus on what Forrest demonstrated about salvage
value turns the burden of proof on its head. The government, not Forrest, had to
show that the restitution award was no greater than the loss that Forrest’s offense
caused. See Hansmeier, 988 F.3d at 440; Adejumo, 848 F.3d at 870. In that task it
failed. The victims’ vehicles had some value, in salvage or in future use, yet the
government neglected to credit Forrest with the value of nearly seventy percent of
those vehicles. If losses not captured by its model offset that credit, the government
never proved it.

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The district court’s authority to shift the burden of calculating the credit to
Forrest is no help to the government in the present posture of the case because the
district court did not exercise that authority. Under 18 U.S.C. § 3664(e), a district
court may “designate[]” the party that has the burden of proof on most restitution
issues “as justice requires.” And our decision in United States v. Arrington
establishes that the magnitude of a restitution credit for property given to a victim is
one such issue, at least in some cases. 97 F.4th 593, 596 (8th Cir. 2024). But the
district court did not designate Forrest as the party with the burden to prove the
magnitude of the credit for the value of the victims’ vehicles. Its only comment on
the burden of proof was a statement that the government had the burden of proving
the victims’ losses.
That Forrest offered a method of estimating the victims’ losses to “rival” the
government’s method did not shift the government’s burden. For the sake of
argument, I accept the court’s conclusion that Forrest assumed “the burden to
demonstrate his method was correct and support his demonstration with evidence.”
But that burden has no bearing on this appeal. The district court did not adopt
Forrest’s method. It adopted the government’s. And by the very same reasoning, the
government assumed the burden to demonstrate that its method was correct and
support its demonstration with evidence. That is the burden it failed to carry.
The difficulty of estimating the victims’ losses does not excuse the
deficiencies of the government’s method. Though the government emphasizes the
complexity of the estimation, the district court had better ways to handle the
challenge than stretching what we mean by a reasonable estimate beyond its
reasonable limits. One of them was making a proper designation to shift to Forrest
the burden to prove any credit for the value of the victims’ vehicles. See id. If the
district court found that “the number of identifiable victims [was] so large as to make
restitution impracticable,” a second was to deny restitution. See 18 U.S.C.
§ 3663A(c)(3)(A). And the district court could have done the same if it found that
“determining complex issues of fact related to the cause or amount” of the victims’

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losses “would complicate or prolong the sentencing process to a degree that the need
to provide restitution to any victim [was] outweighed by the burden on the
sentencing process.” See id. § 3663A(c)(3)(B); see also United States v. Martinez,
690 F.3d 1083, 1089 (8th Cir. 2012). Since the district court did not consider any of
these options, I would vacate the restitution award and remand so it could do so.
______________________________

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