United States v. Fernandez

Defendant pleaded guilty to failing to register as a sex offender and subsequently challenged a life-term special condition of supervised release requiring him to install computer filtering software blocking/monitoring access to sexually oriented websites for any computer he possesses or uses. The court concluded that the district court abused its discretion in imposing the software-installation special condition provision at issue when, inter alia, neither defendant's failure-to-register offense nor his criminal history has any connection to computer use or the Internet. The district court's general concerns about recidivism or that defendant would use a computer to perpetrate future sex-crimes are insufficient to justify the imposition of an otherwise unrelated software-installation special condition. Accordingly, the court vacated and remanded for entry of the corrected judgment. View "United States v. Fernandez" on Justia Law