Bezold v. State

Appeal from the District Court of Carbon County The Honorable Dawnessa A. Snyder, Judge.

Representing Appellant: Office of the State Public Defender: Diane Lozano, State Public Defender; Kirk A. Morgan, Chief Appellate Counsel; Robin S. Cooper, Senior Assistant Appellate Counsel. Argument by Ms. Cooper.

Representing Appellee: Bridget Hill, Wyoming Attorney General; Jenny L. Craig, Deputy Attorney General; Joshua C. Eames, Senior Assistant Attorney General; Timothy P. Zintak, Senior Assistant Attorney General. Argument by Mr. Zintak.

Before FOX, C.J., and DAVIS, KAUTZ, BOOMGAARDEN, and GRAY, JJ.

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DAVIS, JUSTICE.

[¶1] Carrie Bezold was convicted of eight counts of forgery. She claims the evidence was insufficient to show an intent to defraud, and that the district court erred in instructing the jury on the required intent to defraud. We affirm.

ISSUES

[¶2] Ms. Bezold presents two issues, which we state as:

1. Did the district court err in denying Ms. Bezold's motion for judgment of acquittal

2. Did the district court abuse its discretion when it instructed the jury on the required element of intent to defraud?

FACTS

[¶3] Carrie Bezold and her husband Christopher Bezold are residents of Sinclair, Wyoming. In June 2019, they went out of town and asked a family friend, Michael Lesco, to house- and pet-sit for them. After they left, Ms. Bezold sent a text message to Mr. Lesco asking that he fax some paperwork for her. She told him that it was on her desk in a padded envelope addressed to him and that the document was already notarized but could not be faxed until June 26. She also instructed him to fax the document from the Rawlins public library and left him a key to their truck if he needed it for the trip.

[¶4] On June 26, 2019, Mr. Lesco went to fax the document, but instead of going to the library in Rawlins as Ms. Bezold instructed, he went to the Sinclair town hall. Lezlee Musgrave was the town clerk, and as part of her duties, she notarized and faxed documents for members of the public. When Mr. Lesco gave Ms. Musgrave the document Ms. Bezold had asked him to fax, she saw that it contained her notary stamp, with an indication that it had been signed and notarized by her that same day. Because she knew that the signature on the document was not hers and that she had not notarized the document, she contacted the Sinclair chief of police, Jeff Sanders.

[¶5] Chief Sanders examined the document, which was an application for a medical hardship withdrawal from Mr. Bezold's Thrift Savings Plan (TSP).^[1] The application required that the account holder's spouse sign it to indicate her approval of the withdrawal, and it stated, "Your spouse's signature must be notarized." It also required that Mr. Bezold's signature be notarized and stated that "[n]o other acknowledgement is acceptable."

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[¶6] Chief Sanders took the application as evidence and opened an investigation. He contacted the TSP program concerning the application and obtained copies of other medical hardship withdrawal applications that the Bezolds had submitted. He also interviewed Ms. Bezold three times, and over the course of those interviews, she eventually admitted that between 2015 and 2019, she copied Ms. Musgrave's notary stamp onto eight TSP withdrawal applications and forged Ms. Musgrave's signature on the applications before submitting them to the TSP program. The funds from those withdrawals were placed in the Bezolds' joint checking account.

[¶7] The State charged Ms. Bezold with eight counts of forgery for acts committed between January 1, 2015 and June 30, 2019, and a jury trial was held from August 3, 2020 to August 5, 2020. After the State rested, defense counsel moved for judgment of acquittal pursuant to Rule 29 of the Wyoming Rules of Criminal Procedure. Counsel did not dispute the evidence that Ms. Bezold forged Ms. Musgrave's notary stamp and signature, but claimed that the State failed to present evidence of an intent to defraud. The district court took the motion under advisement, and the defense rested without presenting evidence.

[¶8] The State offered two instructions, which the district court pared down and combined into a single instruction that it gave over defense counsel's objection. The disputed instruction, Jury Instruction No. 16, read:

Forgery requires an intent to defraud, but it does not require that anyone actually be defrauded of money or property.

It is not necessary to establish an intent to defraud a particular person or entity.

[¶9] The jury found Ms. Bezold guilty of all eight counts of forgery. Defense counsel then renewed the motion for judgment of acquittal and requested a ruling. The district court denied the motion but invited counsel to renew it in writing to allow more thorough briefing on the question of intent. Defense counsel thereafter filed a written motion for judgment of acquittal, which the court denied. It explained:

7. The State presented substantial evidence for the jury to find Defendant intended to defraud as an element of Forgery. Defendant used Lezlee Musg[r]ave's notary stamp to submit a retirement withdrawal form, both using the stamp to notarize Defendant's signature along with the spouse's signature. Defendant went through the effort to make sure she had current notary stamps to copy. When the family was on vacation, Defendant left explicit instructions on how the documents were

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to be faxed. It was only because Ms. [sic] Lesco failed to follow these instructions that the investigation ensued. Later, when questioned by law enforcement, Defendant provided contradictory explanations as to how the notary stamp got on the documents. The false notary had been applied on multiple application[s] over several years. Defendant was utilizing the notary to complete an application to receive funds from her husband's retirement an [sic] account. In addition, the paperwork required notarization to be accepted and order [sic] for funds to be disbursed. Funds were dispersed based upon these incomplete documents.

8. Based upon the evidence submitted the jury would be able to find beyond a reasonable doubt that Defendant intended to defraud when she used a copy of the notary stamp for both [her] and her husband's signatures.

[¶10] The district court sentenced Ms. Bezold to concurrent three- to five-year prison terms for the eight counts but suspended the sentence in favor of three years of supervised probation. Ms. Bezold timely appealed.

DISCUSSION

A. Sufficiency of the Evidence on Intent to Defraud

[¶11] "The standard of review for a denial of a motion for judgment of acquittal is the same as that used when an appeal claims insufficient evidence to convict because both challenge the sufficiency of the evidence." Childers v. State, 2021 WY 93, ¶ 19, 493 P.3d 168, 171 (Wyo. 2021) (quoting Hightower v. State, 2020 WY 152, ¶ 13, 477 P.3d 103, 105 (Wyo. 2020)).

We do not reweigh the evidence or reexamine the credibility of witnesses, but examine the evidence in the light most favorable to the State. We examine and accept as true the evidence of the prosecution together with all logical and reasonable inferences to be drawn therefrom, leaving out entirely the evidence of the defendant in conflict therewith. In other words, we simply determine whether any rational trier of fact could have found that the essential elements of a charged crime were proven beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence presented.

Id. (cleaned up).

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[¶12] Forgery is statutorily defined as follows:

(a) A person is guilty of forgery if, with intent to defraud, he:

(i) Alters any writing of another without authority;

(ii) Makes, completes, executes, authenticates, issues or transfers any writing so that it purports to be the act of another who did not authorize that act, or to have been executed at a time or place or in a numbered sequence other than was in fact the case, or to be a copy of an original when no such original existed; or

(iii) Utters any writing which he knows to be forged in a manner specified in paragraphs (i) or (ii) of this subsection.

Wyo. Stat. Ann. § 6-3-602(a) (LexisNexis 2021).

[¶13] Ms. Bezold was convicted of eight counts of making a writing that purported to be the act of another who did not authorize that act, as prohibited by subsection (a)(ii). She concedes that she made the writings by copying Ms. Musgrave's notary stamp to the TSP withdrawal applications and signing Ms. Musgrave's name to them. She also admits that she was not authorized to use the notary stamp or Ms. Musgrave's signature. She nonetheless claims that there was no evidence of an intent to defraud and that the evidence was therefore insufficient to support her forgery conviction.

[¶14] As used in our forgery statute, an intent to defraud means "to act willfully and deliberately and with the specific intent to deceive or cheat." Luedtke v. State, 2005 WY 98, ¶¶ 29-32, 117 P.3d 1227, 1233 (Wyo. 2005). Despite our approved definition of an intent to defraud, Ms. Bezold contends that such an intent cannot be found in the absence of evidence that she intended her forgery to harm another. In particular, she asserts that because the TSP withdrawal applications were used to transfer funds from one account owned by her husband into another account owned by him, there was no harm to anyone and thus no evidence of an intent to defraud.

[¶15] In support of her argument, Ms. Bezold relies on two cases: Ford v. State, 2011 WY 122, 259 P.3d 1178 (Wyo. 2011), and Dixon v. Williams, 584 P.2d 1078 (Wyo. 1978). We conclude that both cases are distinguishable and that...