United States v. Boyle, No. 21-1093 (7th Cir. 2022)
Annotate this Case
Kik Messenger flagged suspected child pornography, involving a girl, about eight years old, engaging in explicit sexual acts with an adult male. Agents traced the files to Boyle’s Decatur home. Boyle admitted that he was the man in the images and had live-streamed his sexual abuse of the girl. A search of Boyle’s cell phone revealed 100 images and videos of other children being sexually abused and exploited. The eight-year-old stated that the sexual abuse started when she was five. Boyle pled guilty in state court to predatory criminal sexual assault of a child and was sentenced to 40 years’ imprisonment.
In federal court, Boyle pled guilty based on his production and distribution of visual depictions of that abuse. His Guidelines range was life imprisonment, subject to the cumulative statutory maximum of 230 years. The district court sentenced Boyle to 50 years’ imprisonment, consecutive to his state sentence because the sexual assault “was a separate course of conduct” from the production and possession. The court acknowledged the 18 U.S.C. 3553(a) sentencing objectives and the horrors of Boyle’s own background but stated that Boyle sentenced the child “to a lifetime of nightmares” and immortalized her trauma by live-streaming it. The Seventh Circuit affirmed. The district court was aware of the length and gravity of the 90-year cumulative sentences. What mattered most, however, was the atrocity of Boyle’s offense conduct.
Some case metadata and case summaries were written with the help of AI, which can produce inaccuracies. You should read the full case before relying on it for legal research purposes.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.