ALEXANDRIA: A Heuvelton man was sentenced to a year of federal probation supervision for falsifying records while working as a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent at the Alexandria Bay port of entry.
Todd L. Tyo, 50, also was fined $100 after being found guilty in December 2012 at trial in U.S. District Court, Utica, of two counts of falsifying records.
He had been accused in an indictment of embezzling more than $1,000 from March to August 2011 while working as a customs agent and inspecting commercial trucks coming into the United States from Canada, but a jury found that Mr. Tyo had kept entry fees of $10.75 for just two trucks.
However, in a decision issued in March 2013, Judge David N. Hurd ruled that there was insufficient evidence to support the verdict that came after a six-day trial. While the jury found that Mr. Tyo kept entry fees, Judge Hurd said the jury should not have found that he “knowingly and willfully” did so.
“In fact, the evidence to establish that Tyo kept those two trucks’ entry fees ‘for himself’ was so speculative as to be almost, if not completely, nonexistent,” the judge wrote in his decision.
He said the evidence that Mr. Tyo falsified records with the intent to steal money was inconsistent with the jury acquitting him of other counts alleging that he embezzled money. He said the jury’s reliance on the fact that Mr. Tyo recorded two “no sales” in his records was not enough to support a criminal conviction of wrongdoing.
“Otherwise, any accidental, inadvertent, mistaken or innocent reason for pressing the ‘No Sale’ button after receiving a $10.75 entry fee would be a federal crime. That cannot be,” Judge Hurd wrote. “In fact, the evidence demonstrated that such acts occurred on a daily basis at the Alexandria Bay Port of Entry by various truck attendants. As described by one witness, it was a very ‘sloppy’ operation.”
Federal prosecutors appealed the dismissal in September 2013 and, in a decision rendered July 11, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, New York City, disagreed with Judge Hurd’s ruling and reinstated the convictions.
“We have reviewed the record and conclude that there is sufficient circumstantial evidence for a reasonable jury to have concluded that Tyo in fact stole money on those dates, and that his false statements were made to conceal that material fact,” the three-judge circuit panel wrote in its decision.
