Circuit Court Opinions

The Court affirmed the conviction of a doctor charged with manufacturing and distributing a controlled substance analogue resulting in a woman’s overdose death. The Court affirmed his conviction on the death count based on expert testimony, co-defendant testimony, and circumstantial evidence, and the Court held that the district court had sufficiently instructed the jury on scienter based on the defendant’s knowledge of the identity of the substance. Nor did the trial court err in declining to investigate juror misconduct based on finding a list of “Do’s and Don’ts of Jury Deliberations” in the deliberation room.

The Court vacated the defendant’s conviction for unlawful possession of a firearm by an unlawful immigrant. The Court held that the district court’s pre-Rehaif order excluding the defendant’s immigration applications and evidence that he believed he was legally in the U.S. amounted to plain error given the Supreme Court’s opinion in Rehaif. The Court further held that the defendant was prejudiced by not being able to introduce this evidence given his consistent arguments in pre-trial and sentencing proceedings that he believed he was legally in the U.S.

The Court affirmed the district court’s finding that officers’ warrantless search of a home was justified under the “emergency aid exception.” The Court held that the officers had a reasonable belief that a dog’s whimpering inside the house was a human in need of emergency aid based on their initially responding to a 911 regarding gun shots, the defendant’s belligerent behavior prior to his arrest, and the officers’ belief that someone else may have been in the house.

The Court upheld the defendant’s sentence, which the court ran consecutively to the defendant’s state-imposed prison sentence, holding that the proper standard of review is for abuse of discretion and that the sentence was substantively reasonable.

The Eleventh Circuit rejected a number of challenges in affirming the defendants’ sentences for drug trafficking and unlawful possession of firearms, holding that the district court did not plainly err in shackling the defendants during trial without stating its reasons in the record and that the district court did not abuse its discretion in interviewing jurors in camera regarding their safety concerns and summarizing those interviews for the parties. The Court also concluded that the indictments failure to allege the defendants’ mens rea as required under Rehaif v. United States did not deprive the court of jurisdiction and the plain error of convicting the defendants of unlawful possession of firearm did not warrant reversal where the government would have been able to prove their knowledge.

In an appeal of the defendant’s conviction for retaining government property (in the form of federal grants), the Eleventh Circuit rejected the defendant’s statute of limitations argument, holding that retaining government property is a “continuing offense.” Given the definition of “retention,” the statute of limitations does not begin to run until the defendant relinquishes possession of the government property.

The Eleventh Circuit sua sponte vacated its prior panel opinion where it had previously held that the defendant’s text messages requesting sexually explicit pictures from an undercover officer posing as a minor constituted “making a notice” seeking child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2251(d)(1). The Court’s new opinion held that “making a notice” is ambiguous and, applying the rule of lenity, sending private, person-to-person text messages asking a minor for sexually explicit pictures does not constitute “making a notice” to receive child pornography.

Upon the defendant’s appeal of his revocation of supervised release, the Second Circuit held that the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Haymond did not overrule its prior precedent that district courts may engage in fact-finding when revoking a defendant’s supervised release and imposing an additional term of imprisonment under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(e)(3).

The Court held that the defendant had not exhausted his administrative remedies before filing his motion under 18 U.S.C. § 3582(c)(1)(A) because he had not waited 30 days for the BOP to respond to his request for such a motion and had not received an adverse decision. The defendant had not argued waiver of the exhaustion requirement based on futility, inadequate relief, or irreparable harm.

Where the defendants stole and later destroyed a rare gold bar recovered from a sunken treasure ship, the Court held that in cases involving a unique item or an item that has no market for it, the proper figure to calculate restitution is the “replacement cost” of the item rather than its mere fair market value, which in this case would have been the bar’s weight in gold. However, the district court erred in adopting the victim-museum’s arbitrarily defined value of the gold bar for restitution purposes.