United States v. LaCoste, No. 15-30001 (9th Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CaseDefendant pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and was sentenced to 60 months in prison followed by a three-year term of supervised release. At issue is two of the supervised release conditions the district court imposed: one prohibiting him from using the Internet without prior approval from his probation officer, the other precluding him from residing in certain counties upon his release from prison. The court concluded that the facts of this case do not permit imposition of a total ban on Internet access where defendant’s use of the Internet played only a tangential role in his commission of the underlying fraud offense. When a total ban on Internet access cannot be justified, as is the case here, the court has held that a proviso for probation-officer approval does not cure the problem. Because the Internet-use restriction as currently drafted affected defendant's sentence and may not lawfully be imposed, it necessarily affects his substantial rights and the perceived fairness of the judicial proceedings. Therefore, the court vacated the restriction and remanded for the district court to craft a more narrowly tailored condition if it concludes that such a condition is warranted and valid. The court also concluded that simply declaring that a defendant is likely to resume a life of crime if he returns to a given area is not enough to impose a residency restriction, unless the reasons are obvious from the record. In this case, the record does not make clear why a residency restriction, if one is indeed warranted, should encompass the two out of four counties at issue. Further, the court could not uphold the residency restriction based on the community's need to heal. Therefore, the court vacated the residency restriction and remanded.
Court Description: Criminal Law. The panel vacated conditions of supervised release prohibiting the defendant from using the Internet without prior approval from his probation officer and precluding him from residing in certain counties upon his release from prison, in a case in which the defendant pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Reviewing for plain error, the panel held that the facts of this case do not permit a total ban on Internet access, where the defendant’s use of the Internet played only a tangential role in his commission of the underlying fraud offense, the defendant does not have a history of using the Internet to commit other offenses, and nothing in the record suggests that his use of the Internet to post disparaging comments about some of his victims rose to the level of a criminal offense. The panel wrote that the proviso allowing the defendant to use the Internet so long as he first obtains his probation officer’s approval does not save what is otherwise a plainly overbroad restriction on his liberty. The panel remanded for the district court to craft a more narrowly-tailored condition if it concludes that such a condition is warranted and valid. Reviewing for abuse of discretion, the panel held that simply declaring that the defendant is likely to resume a life of crime if he returns to a given area is not enough to support a residency restriction, unless the reasons are obvious from UNITED STATES V. LACOSTE 3 the record. The panel held that the residency restriction is also flawed because the record does not make clear why such a restriction, if one is warranted, should encompass two counties beyond the counties around which the district court’s stated concerns revolve. The panel could not uphold the restriction on the basis of the community’s need to heal, where the defendant will not return to the community until 2019 after he serves his prison sentence for conduct that occurred in 2006 and 2007. The panel instructed that if the district court seeks to reimpose the condition on remand, it should explain more fully its reasons for doing so. The panel rejected the defendant’s challenges to the validity of his conviction and the length of his prison sentence in an unpublished memorandum.
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