United States v. Dwight Looney

606 F. App'x 744
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
DecidedApril 7, 2015
Docket14-10203
StatusUnpublished
Cited by12 cases

This text of 606 F. App'x 744 (United States v. Dwight Looney) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
United States v. Dwight Looney, 606 F. App'x 744 (5th Cir. 2015).

Opinion

PER CURIAM: **

Appellant, Dwight L. Looney, appeals his conviction and sentence, following his guilty plea, challenging the sufficiency of the factual resume supporting his plea and the district court’s application of the sentencing guidelines. For the following reasons, we affirm Looney’s conviction and sentence.

I. FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS

Looney' pleaded guilty, without a plea agreement, to producing child pornography “using materials that had been mailed, shipped, and transported in and affecting interstate and foreign commerce” in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a). In Looney’s signed factual resume, he admits that he used a camera manufactured outside the State of Texas — the location of the offense — to photograph a minor female in a sexually explicit pose. Looney has also been charged in state court for an offense stemming from the same relevant conduct. He has not been convicted or sentenced in state court, but has been in the state’s custody awaiting disposition of his case. The district court sentenced Looney to 262 months of imprisonment “to run concurrently with any state sentence imposed in the state court action growing out of this same conduct.”

At the sentencing hearing, Looney requested that the district court give him credit for the time he has served in state pretrial custody. The district court denied Looney’s request because Looney had not been convicted or sentenced on the state charges, and the United States Sentencing Guidelines did not require the court to credit Looney the time he served in state pretrial custody.

Three months after pleading guilty Looney moved to dismiss his indictment, arguing that the statute, 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a), is unconstitutional facially and as applied to him. Looney conceded, however, that this Circuit’s precedent forecloses this issue, and he made the argument to preserve it for further review.

On appeal, Looney challenges the sufficiency of. the factual resume supporting his guilty plea and the district court’s refusal to credit him for the time he served in state pretrial custody. First, Looney argues that 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a) must be read to reach only commercial production' of child pornography. It is not enough, he argues, that the camera he used was manufactured outside of Texas. Second, Looney argues that the district court ignored the commentary to the Sentencing Guidelines, which allows a court to credit' a defendant for time served in state pretrial custody.

*746 II. DISCUSSION

A. Sufficiency of the Factual Resume

Looney shifts his argument from the purely constitutional claims raised before the district court and asserts, instead, that the factual resume to which he stipulated was not sufficient to support his conviction.

Looney pleaded guilty to violating 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a), which makes it a violation, inter alia, to produce a visual depiction of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. 1 Under the statute, federal jurisdiction is invoked if the depiction is “produced ... using materials that have been mailed, shipped, or transported in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce by any means.” 2 Looney argues that this requires a “meaningful connection to interstate commerce.” To satisfy this requirement, he argues that the government must show (1) that the defendant procured the materials for the purpose of producing child pornography, or, at least, (2) that the relevant materials moved in interstate commerce at a time reasonably near the offense. Looney’s factual resume states only that he used a camera that was manufactured outside of Texas; therefore, he argues, his factual resume is insufficient to support his conviction.

The government argues that Looney waived this issue by pleading guilty, because Looney’s argument on appeal is a disguised reassertion of his constitutional claims. Alternatively, the government argues that Looney’s argument on appeal is distinct from his argument at the district court such that this court should review Looney’s conviction for plain error.

Looney contends that his argument was not waived by his guilty plea and is sufficiently related to the arguments he presented. in his motion to dismiss to avoid plain error review. Accordingly, Looney argues that the district court’s interpretation of § 2251(a) should be reviewed de novo.

We need not resolve this issue, because even if Looney did not waive his argument by pleading guilty, and even if he sufficiently preserved it in the district court to avoid plain error review, his argument that the factual resume is not sufficient to support his plea clearly lacks merit.

In United States v. Dickson, 632 F.3d 186, 192 (5th Cir.2011), a defendant appealed his conviction of possession of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(4)(B) and production of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2251(a). The jurisdictional hook in both statutes requires the Government to establish that the pornography was produced using materials that had been in interstate commerce. To satisfy this element in Dickson, the Government introduced evidence at trial that the Compact Disc (“CD”) on which the defendant downloaded and preserved pornographic images was manufactured in the Republic of China. 3 We affirmed the defendant’s conviction on both counts. 4 With respect to the possession count, we found that the offense was completed when the defendant produced pornography by *747 copying it to a CD made in China and possessed it in Texas. Since all that was required was production using “materials which have been mailed or so shipped,” 5 the CD satisfied the jurisdictional hook. 6 On the production count, the defendant argued that Congress lacked the power to regulate the purely local conduct of saving images to a CD. 7 We, again, rejected the defendant’s argument. This case makes clear that when items transmitted through interstate commerce are used to produce child pornography, it is sufficient to establish this element of the offense and the jurisdictional hook required by the Commerce Clause. It follows that the proof that the camera used to produce the pornography was shipped into Texas from another state is sufficient to support Looney’s conviction.

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Bluebook (online)
606 F. App'x 744, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-dwight-looney-ca5-2015.