United States v. Shannon, No. 11-3794 (7th Cir. 2014)
Annotate this CaseShannon pled guilty to possessing child pornography (18 U.S.C. 2252(a)(4)) and received a sentence of 46 months’ imprisonment followed by a lifetime of supervised release. About 13 months after he began his supervised release, Shannon’s probation officer filed a petition alleging that Shannon violated conditions of his supervised release by having a web camera connected to his computer without prior permission and by accessing several websites, including those with “teengal” and “teenplanet” in their domain names. The government proceeded only with respect to the web camera because it could not determine the exact ages of the persons in the websites Shannon viewed, but expressed its concern that Shannon viewed sexually explicit websites where the models were intended to depict teenage girls and that Shannon had at one point wiped his hard drive clean. The district court revoked Shannon’s supervised release despite his contention that the websites contained disclaimers that the sites did not actually depict any minors. The Seventh Circuit vacated, noting that the condition banning possession of any sexually explicit material was not restricted to material involving minors, nor was it limited to visual depictions, and that there were no findings or explanation for such a lifetime ban.
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