United States v. Douglas

After defendant pled guilty to failure to register as a sex offender under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA), 18 U.S.C. 2250(a), the district court sentenced defendant to 15 months in prison, followed by five years of supervised release. Defendant appealed the district court's imposition as a special condition of supervised release that he undergo a sex-offender evaluation. The court concluded that the district court acted well within its broad discretion by imposing the condition where it was reasonably related to the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and characteristics of defendant, including his prior sex offense and the extraordinary steps he took to avoid registration and apprehension by law enforcement for many years; the condition was also reasonably related to the need to protect the public from further crimes of defendant, to provide defendant with needed treatment in the most effective manner, and to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct in the future; and the district court's approach of imposing a single condition, and declining to impose additional conditions unless the evaluation were to indicate that they are warranted, reflected the district court's measured judgment to impose conditions causing no greater a deprivation of liberty than was reasonably necessary to satisfy those factors. Because the sentence imposed was procedurally and substantively reasonable, the court affirmed the judgment. View "United States v. Douglas" on Justia Law