United States v. Fifer

863 F.3d 759, 2017 WL 3015843, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 12748
Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit·Decided July 17, 2017·No. No. 16-2812·Published·Cited by 29 cases

Opinion

MANION, Circuit Judge.

Marcus Fifer was tried and convicted on multiple counts of producing child pornography. On appeal he challenges several of the district court’s evidentiary rulings and one of its jury instructions. He also appeals the terms of his supervised release. We find no error and affirm.

I. Background

A. Search and Seizure

In November 2013, police used a confidential source to complete two controlled buys of heroin from an apartment in [763] Springfield, Illinois. The apartment belonged to a registered sex offender named Marcus Fifer. Shortly afterwards, the police obtained a search warrant from an Illinois state court authorizing them to search Fifer’s apartment for drugs and other evidence including cell phones and computers. During the search, they discovered a half-naked 16-year-old girl hiding under a bed. The girl (whose initials are C.T.) was at first uncooperative; she refused to come out from under the bed and she lied about her name and age.

One of the officers attempted to identify the girl by looking through some cell phones and a tablet that were recovered from the apartment. When the officer saw sexually explicit images of C.T. and Fifer on those devices, he referred the case to his department’s sex-crimes division.1 Officers from that division eventually secured C.T.’s cooperation. C.T. revealed that she and Fifer had been living together over the past several months and had produced a number of sex videos using the electronic devices (four cell phones, a laptop computer, and a tablet) found in the apartment.

The police then got a warrant from federal court to search the electronic devices for child pornography. The application for the federal warrant made no mention of the initial on-site search of the phones or tablet, but was based entirely on C.T.’s statements to the officers from the sex-crimes division. The execution of the federal warrant revealed sexually explicit images and videos of C.T. and Fifer.

B. Proceedings

In 2015 Fifer was charged with more than twenty counts of producing child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251(a) and (e). Before trial, Fifer moved to suppress the evidence obtained from his electronic devices on the ground that the state search warrant lacked probable cause. The district court found probable cause and denied the motion to suppress. At the same time, the court granted the government’s motion to exclude evidence regarding Fifer’s knowledge (or lack of knowledge) of C.T.’s age, and also excluded as irrelevant a number of exhibits and witnesses proffered by Fifer to show that he and C.T. had a “loving relationship.” Initially the court also barred evidence of Fifer’s prior sex-offense conviction,2 but later admitted the conviction after Fifer testified at trial that his “sole purpose” in producing pornography with C.T. was to enhance their loving relationship.

At the close of the evidence, the court used this Circuit’s pattern jury instruction 3 to advise the jury on how to evaluate the opinion testimony presented at trial. Fifer unsuccessfully objected to the instruction on the ground that it bolstered the government’s expert witnesses by mentioning their official titles. Here’s the portion of the instruction to which Fifer objected:

You have heard witnesses, namely, Department of Homeland Security Task Force Officer Ellen Price, who gave opinions and testimony about forensic [764] examination of electronic items as well as the extraction of child pornography from those same electronic items, and Department of Homeland Security Resident agent in charge Michael Mitchell...,

The jury ultimately found Fifer guilty of eighteen counts of producing child pornography. The district court sentenced Fifer to 35 years in prison plus lifetime supervised release with mandatory sex-offender treatment. The court ordered Fifer to “abide by the rules of the [sex-offender] treatment provider [and] submit to physiological testing, including polygraph testing.”

II. Discussion

On appeal Fifer challenges each of the district court’s evidentiary rulings recounted above. He also challenges the jury instruction on opinion testimony and the length and terms of his supervised release. We address each challenge in turn.

A. Motion to Suppress

In reviewing the district court’s denial of Fifer’s motion to suppress, we review its legal conclusions de novó and its factual findings for clear error. United States v. McPhaul, 835 F.3d 687, 689 (7th Cir. 2016).

1. Probable Cause

Fifer argues that the evidence obtained from his apartment should have been suppressed because the state search warrant was not supported by' probable cause.4 Probable cause exists when the supporting affidavit “sets forth sufficient facts to induce a reasonably prudent person to believe that-a search will uncover contraband or evidence of a crime.” United States v. Sidwell, 440 F.3d 865, 868 (7th Cir. 2006). “This common-sense, non-technical determination is based not on individual facts in isolation but on the totality of the circumstances known at the time a warrant is requested.” United States v. Aljabari, 626 F.3d 940, 944 (7th Cir. 2010). We give “great deference” to the issuing judge’s finding of probable cause. United States v. Dessart, 823 F.3d 395, 400 (7th Cir. 2016).

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United States v. Fifer, 863 F.3d 759, 2017 WL 3015843, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 12748 (7th Cir. 2017).

863 F.3d 759 (United States v. Fifer) — published by Counsel Stack Legal Research, free access to 12M+ legal documents.

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