United States v. McElmurry, No. 12-50183 (9th Cir. 2015)
Annotate this CaseDefendant appealed his conviction for possessing and distributing child pornography. The court concluded that convictions for possessing child pornography and distributing the same child pornography do not amount to double jeopardy; sharing the child pornography through a peer-to-peer network amounts to distribution, even though the distributor does not take some concrete affirmative action for the particular download that is charged as the distribution. The court also concluded that the evidence was sufficient to convict defendant of distribution under United States v. Budziak. In regards to defendant's argument under Federal Rule of Evidence 403 regarding the district court's admission of interview statements made in connection with a prior child pornography conviction, the Curtin-Waters error compels reversal. The district court cannot properly exercise its discretion to decide whether the probative value of evidence objected to under Rule 403 outweighs the risk of unfair prejudice without examining the evidence. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded for further proceedings.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel vacated a criminal judgment and remanded in a case in which the defendant was convicted of possessing child pornography, and distributing it through an online peer- to-peer file-sharing network. The panel rejected the defendant’s contention that convicting him of possessing and distributing the same images amounted to double jeopardy. The panel explained that neither possession nor distribution of child pornography is necessarily a lesser-included offense of the other. The panel held that, as the defendant concedes, conduct such as his constitutes distribution under United States v. Budziak, 697 F.3d 1105 (9th Cir. 2012), which held that maintaining child pornography in a shared folder, knowing that doing so will enable others to download it, if another person does download it, amounts to sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction for distribution. The panel rejected the government’s contention that the defendant waived his Fed. R. Evid. 403 objection to the district court’s admission pursuant to Fed. R. Evid. 404(b) of interview statements he made in connection with a prior state law child-pornography conviction, and in a letter written to an inmate a few months before the present crime was charged. The panel explained that a trial objection to what the court UNITED STATES V. MCELMURRY 3 had already definitively ruled unobjectionable, on the defendant’s in limine motion, would have amounted to taking exception to an evidentiary ruling already made, which Fed. R. Evid. 103 says is unnecessary. The panel explained that because remand is necessary under Rule 403, it did not need to decide whether the government correctly invoked Rule 404(b). The panel held that United States v. Curtin, 489 F.3d 935 (9th Cir. 2007) (en banc), requires reversal in this case under Rule 403 because the record, briefs and oral argument establish that the district court admitted the statements and the letter without reading or listening to the material. The panel wrote that the government has not claimed that the error was harmless, much less borne its burden of proof of harmlessness. Judge Christen concurred in part and dissented in part. She concurred in the portions of the majority opinion regarding double jeopardy and sufficiency of evidence to support the distribution conviction, as well as the majority’s conclusion that the district court erred by making a Rule 403 determination with respect to the interview statements without reviewing them. She dissented from the majority’s conclusion that the district court made a similar error with respect to the letter. She wrote that because the district court’s pretrial ruling did not definitively address the specific letter exhibit that the government ultimately sought to introduce and because the defendant did not object at trial under Rule 403, she would review for plain error the district court’s determination that the probative value of the letter outweighed its prejudicial effect, and would affirm the district court’s ruling. 4 UNITED STATES V. MCELMURRY
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