United States v. Marvin D. Bridges

347 F. App'x 459
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit
DecidedSeptember 22, 2009
Docket08-17225
StatusUnpublished

This text of 347 F. App'x 459 (United States v. Marvin D. Bridges) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Eleventh 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. Marvin D. Bridges, 347 F. App'x 459 (11th Cir. 2009).

Opinion

PER CURIAM:

Marvin D. Bridges appeals his convictions and sentence of 135 months of imprisonment for knowingly receiving child pornography and knowingly possessing material that contained child pornography. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2252A(a)(2)(A), (a)(5)(B). Bridges challenges the denial of his motion to suppress and the reasonableness of his sentence. We affirm.

I. BACKGROUND

In 2006, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigated an organization that distributed child pornography over the Internet through a website called “Home Collection.” The organization offered in exchange for a monthly subscription fee access to member-restricted webpages that contained images and videos of child pornography. The organization used PayPal accounts to process the payments. PayPal maintained records of the purchases and catalogued seven details of the transactions: date and time of the payment; name of the customer; seller’s description of the item; amount of the purchase; customer’s internet protocol address and email address; seller’s email address; and the item identification. Pay *461 Pal also recorded the customer’s billing address.

Agents of the Bureau obtained a record from PayPal that identified Bridges as a customer of a child pornography website. The record stated that on December 9, 2006, Marvin Dee Bridges paid $99.95 for access to a webpage titled the Sick Child Room. Federal agents accessed the web-page and discovered it contained “in excess of 150 video files and 20,000 image files” of “prepubescent female minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct” with adult men. The PayPal record also listed Bridges’s home address in Gainesville, Georgia; the phone number registered for the Gaines-ville residence; the internet protocol address of the computer that accessed the PayPal account; a primary email address; and the “Referral URL,” or the internet address of the webpage visited immediately before the purchase transaction. The Referral URL last accessed by Bridges was a webpage that contained images of children being exploited sexually. Federal agents disclosed the information they collected to local authorities for further investigation.

Investigator J.D. Roe of the Sheriffs Office of Forsyth County, Georgia, applied for an affidavit to search Bridges’s home. Investigator Roe offered in support of the warrant a 26-page affidavit that provided background information about computers and the internet. The warrant also described the investigation by the Bureau; several child pornography websites, including Home Collection, Jfire Financial, and Bullet Proof Soft; the images and videos found on those websites, and their payment processes; the transaction by Bridges; and the Sick Child Room web-page. The affidavit stated that investigators of the Sheriffs Office had performed a background check and identified past criminal complaints against Bridges; had verified with the Division of Motor Vehicles that Marvin Dee Bridges had a state driver’s license, lived at the Gainesville address, and had a vehicle registered at that address; and confirmed that Bridges had an active telephone line at his Gainesville residence. Investigator Roe also described his experience investigating child pornography and stated that collectors of child pornography ordinarily store their illegal images and videos at home and retain hard copies of those images for extended periods of time.

That same day, a Georgia court issued a warrant to search Bridges’s residence for five categories of evidence: images and files containing images of child pornography; information and correspondence pertaining to the possession, receipt, or distribution of child pornography transmitted or received in interstate commerce; information regarding Bridges’s credit cards; records regarding the occupancy or ownership of the Gainesville residence; and records or other evidence of the ownership or use of computer equipment found in the residence. Investigator Roe, members of the Sheriffs Office, and federal agents executed the warrant. The officers seized Bridges’s computer, an internal hard drive, recordable disks, and floppy disks. A review of Bridges’s computer revealed that he possessed hundreds of images and some videos portraying children engaged in masturbation, vaginal and digital penetration by adult males and foreign objects, and other forms of sexual abuse. Bridges was later indicted for knowingly receiving child pornography and knowingly possessing material that contained child pornography. 18 U.S.C. §§ 2252A(a)(2), (a)(5)(B).

Bridges moved to suppress the evidence seized from his home. Bridges argued that the search warrant was invalid because it failed to allege that evidence of a *462 crime would be discovered in his home. Bridges alleged that the government had the means, but failed, to identify the physical location of the computer that accessed the Sick Child Room or verify that Bridges had an active account with an internet service provider.

The government responded that the affidavit provided probable cause to support the search warrant and, in the alternative, the evidence seized from Bridges’s home was admissible under the good-faith exception of United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 104 S.Ct. 3405, 82 L.Ed.2d 677 (1984). The government explained that Investigator Roe omitted inadvertently three additional facts that contributed to a finding of probable cause: the PayPal account assigned to Bridges was used to purchase subscriptions to child-exploitation webpages, including Bullet Proof Soft and Jfire Financial, on June 26, 27, and 29, 2007; the credit cards used to purchase the subscriptions were registered to Bridges and he had not disputed charges to the account or reported that his card was lost or stolen; and a telephone in Bridges’s home was assigned the phone number listed on the PayPal account. The government attached to its response a report prepared by Roe that compiled information about the use of Bridges’s credit cards to purchase child pornography on the Internet and explained that Bridges’s service provider, America Online, used a process called dynamic Internet Protocol addressing. Under dynamic addressing, a service provider is assigned a block of IP addresses and allocates an unused IP address each time a customer initiates a session on the internet.

A magistrate judge recommended the district court deny Bridges’s motion to suppress. The magistrate judge ruled that the affidavit provided probable cause to believe that evidence of a crime would be found at Bi’idges’s home. The magistrate judge ruled, in the alternative, that the good-faith exception of Leon applied because the affidavit contained sufficient indicia of probable cause for Investigator Roe to believe that the search warrant was valid.

The district court adopted in part the recommendation of the magistrate judge.

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Bluebook (online)
347 F. App'x 459, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/united-states-v-marvin-d-bridges-ca11-2009.