United States v. Jeremy Kelley

861 F.3d 790, 2017 WL 2820994, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 11675
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit
DecidedJune 30, 2017
Docket16-2696
StatusPublished
Cited by42 cases

This text of 861 F.3d 790 (United States v. Jeremy Kelley) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eighth 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. Jeremy Kelley, 861 F.3d 790, 2017 WL 2820994, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 11675 (8th Cir. 2017).

Opinion

SMITH, Circuit Judge.

Jeremy Kelley was convicted of one count of receiving child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(2) and (b)(1), three counts of receiving child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(2) and (b)(1), and one count of possessing child pornography involving a minor under 12 years old in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(5)(B) and (b)(2). The district court 2 sentenced Kelley to five concurrent 124-month sentences. The court also imposed a $2,000 fine and a $5,000 special assessment pursuant to the Justice For Victims of Trafficking Act of 2015. Kelley appeals his conviction, arguing that the district court erred in denying his motion for acquittal, admitting testimony regarding his use of adult pornography, and imposing the $5,000 special assessment. Finding no error, we affirm.

*793 I. Background

In May 2015, the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force — a coordinated effort of federal, state, and local law enforcement — identified an Internet Protocol (IP) address in Northwest Arkansas that was used to download videos known to contain child pornography as previously catalogued by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Using investigative software, law enforcement determined that approximately 59 files of known child pornography were downloaded from this IP address using the Ares peer-to-peer file-sharing network between January 7th and May 5th of 2015. Investigators traced the IP address to a Cox Communications account connected to a residence owned by Jeremy Kelley and his wife in Prairie Grove, Arkansas.

On June 25, 2015, investigators executed a search warrant on the residence connected to the internet account. Kelley and his wife were home when the search began. Special Agent Gerald Faulkner of Homeland Security Investigations interviewed Kelley, who confirmed that his family had internet service through Cox Communications and that the service was secured by a password. Kelley admitted that he was the primary user of a Toshiba laptop found in the living room and that his wife and other family members all used their own computing devices. Although Kelley and his wife were the home’s only full-time residents, Kelley’s children from other marriages would occasionally visit. Kelley admitted to having a paid membership to the Ares peer-to-peer network. He claimed that he had not used the Ares program to download pornography in years and that he only downloaded adult pornography. Agent Faulkner testified that Kelley admitted viewing adult pornography, stating:

I asked Mr. Kelley in the past what type of pornography, and he relayed that it was adult pornography, or what he called role-playing pornography, where adult females are made to look like underage teenage girls.
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I asked Mr. Kelley when he did use[ ] to look up child pornography through Ares, what search terms, [and] he said that he would use “office sex,” “lesbian,” “young teen,” “teen,” and “Vicky Vette.”[ 3 ]
[[Image here]]
I informed him that the downloads of known child pornography videos in question were approximately between January 7th through May 5th of 2015, at which time Mr. Kelley recanted his initial statement and said that he had, in fact, downloaded adult pornography during that timeframe through Ares.
* * *
I asked Mr. Kelley if any of those videos contained child pornography or depicted children of questionable ages. He said that some of them looked very young. One video in particular that he described, that based on the camera angle from the video and the underdeveloped] chest area of the child, it was hard to determine whether it was a boy or a girl.

Agent Faulkner also testified that Kelley recognized some of the titles of the files that the Task Force had identified as downloaded under Kelley’s IP address: “Mr. Kelley advised that some of the titles in the downloads did look familiar, and he acknowledged the use of the term Vicky’ in the titles.” According to Agent Faulkner, a search for “Vicky,” instead of ‘Vicky Vette,” often returns child pornography depicting “an actual real girl [named Vicky] that has been rescued and identified by law enforcement, and her series of *794 videos that had been transferred all over the world are now a known recognition to the National Center For Missing and Exploited Children.”

Before leaving Kelley’s home, law enforcement confiscated the computing devices found there, including the Toshiba laptop primarily used by Kelley. The computer had three user profiles, enabling access by Kelley, his wife, and his son. Detective Andy Higdon of the Fayetteville Police Department completed a forensic analysis of the Ares program on Kelley’s laptop. He testified that Kelley’s password-protected profile had run searches for files using the terms “8-yr-old,” “daughter incest,” “daughter lover,” “kidnapped girl,” “playtime niece,” “sex uncle,” and “pedo.” He also testified that someone had searched for “Vicky” but not “Vette” using the program. Detective Higdon described how the Ares search feature worked: “when you’re searching through the Ares program[,] for instance, the search keyword ‘daughter incest,’ that can be any part of the file.... If ‘daughter’ is a part of that filename, it’s going to pull that. If ‘incest’ is a part of that filename, it’s going to pull that.” As an example, Detective Higdon described one of the video files found on Kelley’s computer called “8-year niece learns sex with uncle,” which could have been discovered through the search feature using several of the identified search terms including “8-yr-old,” “sex uncle,” and “playtime niece.”

Detective Travis Monson of the Spring-dale Police Department also completed a forensic examination of Kelley’s laptop.-At trial, Detective Monson testified to finding more than an hour of video footage spread across 15 different video files containing child pornography. All the child pornography files were found on Kelley’s password-protected profile, using the Ares account paid for by Kelley, Detective Monson identified the four files at issue in Kelley’s indictment: three appeared to have been downloaded on May 5th between 1:17 p.m. and 2:07 p.m., and one was downloaded on May 1st. Detective Monson testified that download dates could be manipulated by adjusting the computer clock. He also noted the possibility of a batch download in which a user initiates the download of multiple files, and each file receives a times-tamp at the time of its completion — thus, a person could start a large download in the morning, and each file would receive a timestamp at some point later in the day when the respective downloads are completed. Detective Monson also testified that a number of videos were in Kelley’s “Recent Folder,” meaning that the files had' been accessed recently. The laptop also had installed a utility program called CCleaner.

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
861 F.3d 790, 2017 WL 2820994, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 11675, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-jeremy-kelley-ca8-2017.