No. 21-1779

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Appellee,

v.

BYRON ALLAN CARDOZO,

Defendant, Appellant.

APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF MASSACHUSETTS

[Hon. Allison D. Burroughs, U.S. District Judge]

Before

Barron, Chief Judge, Selya and Thompson, Circuit Judges.

Leslie Feldman-Rumpler for appellant. Alexandra W. Amrhein, Assistant United States Attorney, with whom Rachael S. Rollins, United States Attorney, was on brief, for appellee.

May 26, 2023 SELYA, Circuit Judge. Cyberstalking is an ugly crime, and Congress has made it clear that an order for restitution is one way of bringing offenders to account. This appeal concerns the implementation of that restitution remedy. In the underlying case, defendant-appellant Byron Allan Cardozo was convicted of both cyberstalking and making interstate threats. See 18 U.S.C. §§ 2261A(2)(B), 875(c). Earlier, we affirmed his sentence but left open the issue of restitution. See United States v. Cardozo, Nos. 20-1318, 20-1398, 2021 WL 3771818, at *2 (1st Cir. Aug. 25, 2021) (per curiam). The district court then entered an amended judgment, ordering the defendant to pay restitution to the victim in the sum of $72,112.62.

In this court, the defendant contests the district court's restitution order. See United States v. Cardozo, No. 18- 10251, Dkt. 88 (D. Mass. Sept. 2, 2020). After careful consideration of a series of dystopian events and a constellation of expenses incurred in consequence of those events, we modify the restitution order and affirm the order as modified.

I

We briefly rehearse the relevant facts and travel of the case. Because this appeal trails in the wake of a guilty plea, "we glean the relevant facts from the change-of-plea colloquy, the unchallenged portions of the presentence investigation report (PSI

- 2 - Report), and the record of the disposition hearing." United States v. Vargas, 560 F.3d 45, 47 (1st Cir. 2009).

The defendant had a sexual encounter with Jane Doe in 2001, when he was seventeen years old and she was only thirteen. At the time, the defendant and Doe attended the same school in Florida.

Over the course of the next fifteen years, the defendant periodically tried to contact Doe. In 2016, Doe responded to a Facebook message from the defendant. She explained that she felt traumatized by the 2001 episode and wanted to publish an essay about it. The defendant gave Doe permission to publish such an essay.

Doe was true to her word: she wrote the essay and arranged for its publication in an online magazine in December of 2016. In the essay, she used pseudonyms for everyone but herself and described the sexual encounter as coercive and traumatic.

For the next twenty months, the defendant (anonymously, for the most part) used various online platforms to harass and threaten Doe. He contacted Doe on hundreds of occasions, sometimes through Facebook or Twitter and sometimes by posting comments on her personal website. When Doe blocked him, he created false accounts and continued to hassle her. The content of the messages careened between claims that Doe had fabricated the coercive nature of the encounter, graphic descriptions of real and imagined sexual

- 3 - exploits with her, professions of love, suggestions that he would commit suicide, and express and implied threats of violent retribution.