United States v. Schrank, No. 19-5903 (6th Cir. 2020)
Annotate this CaseSchrank visited the dark web and downloaded “nearly 1,000 images of babies and toddlers being forcibly, violently, and sadistically penetrated.” After a government investigation identified Schrank, he confessed and pled guilty to possession of child pornography 18 U.S.C. 2252(a)(4)(B). The Sentencing Guidelines called for a sentence of 97-120 months in prison. The district court imposed a non-custodial sentence of 12 months’ home confinement. The government appealed, and the Sixth Circuit vacated the sentence as substantively unreasonable. It both “ignored or minimized the severity of the offense” and “failed to account for general deterrence.” On remand, the district court imposed the same sentence, criticizing the appellate court’s “second-guess[ing]” and saying that she refused to impose a sentence that “does not make sense.” The judge said that Schrank’s misconduct—accessing the dark web over the course of five days and downloading nearly 1,000 images of children being raped—was “much less exaggerated” than “the Sixth Circuit judges realize.” The Sixth Circuit again vacated and remanded for resentencing, ordering that the case be reassigned on remand. A sentence is substantively unreasonable when it is not “proportionate to the seriousness of the circumstances of the offense and offender.”
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