United States v. Fernandez, No. 14-30151 (5th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CaseDefendant pleaded guilty to failing to register as a sex offender and subsequently challenged a life-term special condition of supervised release requiring him to install computer filtering software blocking/monitoring access to sexually oriented websites for any computer he possesses or uses. The court concluded that the district court abused its discretion in imposing the software-installation special condition provision at issue when, inter alia, neither defendant's failure-to-register offense nor his criminal history has any connection to computer use or the Internet. The district court's general concerns about recidivism or that defendant would use a computer to perpetrate future sex-crimes are insufficient to justify the imposition of an otherwise unrelated software-installation special condition. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded for entry of the corrected judgment.
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