Circuit Court Opinions

In a matter of first impression, the Third Circuit vacated defendant’s denied motion for resentencing under Section 404 of the First Step Act and remanded for resentencing, holding the § 3553 factors must be considered anew when a sentence is modified. The Court relied on the plain text of 18 U.S.C. § 3582, § 404 of the First Step Act, and § 3553, which all refer to “imposing” a sentence and thus require consideration of factors relevant to imposing a sentence, such as a defendant’s post-sentence rehabilitation.

The Fifth Circuit vacated special conditions of a defendant’s supervised release and remanded for resentencing holding that an absolute ban on computer use or internet access for ten years after serving a 12.5-year sentence was plain error. The Court held that the condition was overbroad because it was not narrowly tailored by scope or duration and would preclude defendant from participating meaningfully in modern society for long periods of time due to the ubiquitous nature and importance of the Internet.

The Second Circuit vacated a defendant’s supervised release condition and remanded for resentencing holding that a condition of release prohibiting him from online speech promoting or endorsing violence was unconstitutionally vague and violated defendant’s right to free speech under the First Amendment. The Court held that language in the condition defining “violence” included open-ended language allowing the condition to be applied without limits.

In a matter of first impression, the Third Circuit vacated a defendant’s sentence, holding that the abuse of trust adjustment under 3B1.13 applies only to the actual money laundering conduct and not to the underlying offense from which the funds are derived. The Court held that the enhancement did not apply where the defendant stole passwords at his job to issue checks from abandoned accounts, since that was not the basis of the money laundering count, and did not apply to the defendant sending the checks to his friends for deposit into their bank accounts or the defendant’s bank account, since the defendant did not occupy a position of trust in relation to that conduct.

The Sixth Circuit held that the good faith exception under Leon applies to arrest warrants as well as search warrants, affirming the district court’s denial of defendant’s motion to suppress evidence seized when agents executed an arrest warrant at his residence and place of business.

In a matter of first impression, the Third Circuit affirmed a defendant’s conviction of immigration fraud and perjury for lying during his oral interview with a USCIS officer about his involvement with organizations and killing others in his home county. Although the Court held that the statute applied only to written documents, the defendant’s conviction was not plain error since the statutory interpretation was not clear and no other court had considered the statute’s ordinary meaning before.

The Second Circuit affirmed defendant’s conviction for bribing individuals to register to vote and submitting false voter registrations, holding that the federal election statute applied to defendant influencing a strictly local election since voter registration is part of a unitary system that governs local, state and federal elections regardless of the defendant’s intent to affect only a local election.

The Ninth Circuit declined a rehearing en banc, leaving in place a panel opinion holding that a warrantless forensic search of the defendant’s phone was outside the scope of a permissible routine border search and violated the Fourth Amendment. The Court held that warrantless border searches are limited in scope to routine customs inspections for contraband, not evidence, that the only kind of contraband on a phone is child pornography, and that the officers did not have reasonable suspicion that the phone contained child pornography.

The Ninth Circuit vacated the defendant’s conviction and held that the attenuation doctrine should not have been applied to deny his motion to suppress. The officers’ second, discretionary search of the defendant’s home was a direct result of a prior unlawful sweep of the home during which officers discovered that the defendant had a condition of supervised release allowing searches. The temporal proximity between the searches and the investigatory motives of the officers outweighed the intervening nature of discovering the condition of supervised release, and evidence discovered during the second search should have been suppressed.

The Sixth Circuit under abuse of discretion vacated the defendant’s sentence and remanded for resentencing, holding that upward variance applied by the district court based on the defendant’s criminal history was unreasonable because it applied too much weight to a prior conviction and parole violations from the same offense. The Court also held that it was the defendant’s first firearm offense, a 15-year gap existed from prior dangerous conduct, and compared to similar cases, the doubling of his sentence had no meaningful relationship to his likelihood of reoffending.