United States v. Eaglin

913 F.3d 88
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit·Decided January 11, 2019·No. Docket No. 17-1224-cr; August Term, 2017·Published·Cited by 106 cases

Opinion

Susan L. Carney, Circuit Judge:

*91This case concerns the imposition of broad bans on Internet access and on possession of legal adult pornography as conditions of a multi-year term of supervised release. We conclude that the record here does not support imposition of these sweeping prohibitions. To be sustained, a virtually categorical prohibition on a defendant's use of any device to access the Internet-a technology around which our society now unmistakably turns-must be carefully explained and robustly supported by a district court. As the Supreme Court recently reiterated, "cell phones and the services they provide are 'such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life' that carrying one is indispensable to participation in modern society." Carpenter v. United States , --- U.S. ----, 138 S.Ct. 2206, 2210, 201 L.Ed.2d 507 (2018) (quoting Riley v. California , --- U.S. ----, 134 S.Ct. 2473, 2478, 189 L.Ed.2d 430 (2014) ); see also Packingham v. North Carolina , --- U.S. ----, 137 S.Ct. 1730, 198 L.Ed.2d 273 (2017). Although Internet access through smart phones and other devices undeniably offers the potential for wrongdoing, to consign an individual to a life virtually without access to the Internet is to exile that individual from society. The record here inadequately supports the District Court's decision to take that drastic step.

On abuse of discretion review, we conclude that both the virtual ban on Internet access and the prohibition on viewing or possessing adult pornography are substantively unreasonable because, given the record before us, they are not reasonably related to the sentencing factors and impose a greater restriction than reasonably necessary to achieve the goals of sentencing. The cause is REMANDED for resentencing consistent with this opinion.

BACKGROUND2

Defendant-Appellant Jarret Eaglin was convicted in 2003 and 2004 in New Hampshire state court on four counts of felonious sexual assault. His convictions stem from his sexual relationships with two thirteen-year-old girls in that state when he was twenty-one and twenty-two years old. Under New Hampshire law, "felonious sexual assault" is a statutory crime that is based on the age of the younger party alone, without regard to the age or mens rea of the perpetrator. N.H. Rev. Stat. § 632-A:3 (2003) (to "[e]ngage[ ] in sexual penetration with a person ... under 16 years of age" is a class B felony); see Goodrow v. Perrin , 119 N.H. 483, 488, 403 A.2d 864 (1979) (no scienter requirement in § 632-A:3 ). For the convictions related to the first victim, Eaglin received a sentence of twelve months' incarceration and two years' probation; for the conviction related to the second victim, he received a deferred sentence and five years' probation. The convictions render Eaglin a "sex offender" under federal law, 34 U.S.C. § 20911, and obligate him to comply with certain federal statutory registration requirements applicable to sex offenders, 18 U.S.C. § 2250.

In the fifteen years that have passed since his first convictions, Eaglin has struggled to comply fully with the multiple *92conditions of his supervised release, which have been renewed and revised on several occasions. He also has struggled to abide by the requirements resulting from his sex offender status. In 2005, for example, he was remanded to custody for three breaches: failing to report a 2004 arrest following a domestic dispute with his girlfriend,3 failing to complete a sex offender counseling program, and failing to obtain permission from his probation officer before changing his place of residence. More recently, in September 2012, Eaglin pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to violating the federal registration statute by failing to register as a sex offender when he moved from New Hampshire to New York in August 2011. For that conviction, he was sentenced by Judge Joseph A. Diclerico, Jr., to twenty-one months' imprisonment and fifteen years of supervised release.

In early 2014, the job of monitoring Eaglin's compliance with the terms of his supervised release for his 2012 conviction was transferred to the Northern District of New York, so that Eaglin could legally return to Glen Falls, New York, and live near his immediate family. His compliance challenges continued, however, in New York: in May 2014, Eaglin was penalized with a two-month home detention period for his failure to report incidental contact with a minor and his chronic unemployment. As part of this detention, Eaglin was instructed to stay away from his former residence, where the incidental contact occurred. In July 2014, he was again penalized-this time, with a two-month period of curfew-after he failed to report that he had returned briefly without permission to his former residence (where his sister then resided) to get a ride to his sex offender treatment program after (as the Probation Office described it) "the bus he was supposed to take to treatment broke down." App. 14. And in 2015, a warrant issued for Eaglin's arrest after, over a period of months, he violated several conditions of release by failing to participate in a sex offender treatment program, failing to notify his probation officer of a change in employment, failing to register a new address with the state sex offender registry, viewing and possessing adult pornography, and traveling outside the Northern District of New York to central Massachusetts without permission. For those violations, Judge D'Agostino of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York sentenced Eaglin to sixteen months of incarceration, to be followed by thirteen years of supervised release. On the recommendation of the government and of the Probation Office, the District Court continued to impose conditions banning access to sexually explicit materials and banning access to the Internet unless he participated in a monitoring program that would be run by Probation.

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