Justia U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals Opinion Summaries

A jury convicted Defendant of two counts of distributing heroin. Before trial Defendant filed multiple motions in limine seeking to prevent the government from introducing certain evidence. Defendant now appeals the district court’s denial of two of those motions in limine. Defendant also argues there was insufficient evidence to convict him of both offenses and that the district court abused its discretion in imposing a 10-year sentence. The Eighth Circuit affirmed.   Defendant argues the contested evidence cannot be considered “intrinsic” evidence—that is, “evidence of wrongful conduct other than the conduct at issue offered for the purpose of providing the context in which the charged crime occurred.” Here, the court found that the district court did not abuse its discretion in admitting evidence of the overdose of a person that received Defendant’s heroin. The person’s overdose was relevant to prove the substance Defendant distributed was heroin. The district court’s instructions properly outlined the elements of distribution of heroin—that is, they did not instruct the jury to convict Defendant for the victim’s injuries—thus mitigating the risk of prejudice.   Defendant further argued a reasonable jury would not have credited the witness’s testimony since the witness was a heroin addict, failed to accuse Defendant when initially questioned about the incident in 2018, identified Defendant from a single photograph, and testified in exchange for immunity. The court concluded that credibility determinations, however, are best left to the jury.Finally, after reviewing the record, the court held  the district court’s findings supporting Defendant’s sentence were not clearly erroneous. View "United States v. Michael Watley" on Justia Law

A jury convicted Defendant of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Defendant challenged the admission of his prior felony firearm conviction under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b). He also appealed the procedural and substantive reasonableness of his sentence.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. Defendant first challenged the admission of his 2008 conviction as improper propensity evidence. The court explained that even assuming for the sake of argument that evidence of the prior crime was inadmissible, any error was harmless. The Government asked the witness only two vague questions about the prior conviction and mentioned it in passing during the closing argument. The district court gave a limiting instruction when the evidence was introduced, telling the jury that it could only be used to show knowledge, intent, or absence of mistake, and not as evidence of guilt. The prosecutor repeated the limiting guidance in her closing argument. And the jury had ample evidence to support its verdict even without the evidence—including a recording from the post-arrest interview in which Defendant admitted that he handled the guns.   Defendant further argued that hat the district court did not give enough consideration to Section 3553(a) factors when deciding his sentence. The court explained that based on the record as a whole, particularly the court’s engagement with each side’s arguments at sentencing, the court is satisfied that the district court was aware of and adequately considered the Section 3553(a) factors. Finally, in considering that a within-Guidelines sentence is presumptively reasonable, the court held that Defendant failed to overcome this presumption of reasonableness. View "United States v. Kenneth Barbee, Jr." on Justia Law

Defendant appealed the denial of his motion to suppress, having preserved the right to do so pursuant to his conditional plea of guilty. He also appeals his sentence, challenging his classification as an armed career criminal pursuant to the Armed Career Criminal Act (ACCA), 18 U.S.C. 924(e), and in the alternative, the calculation of his Guidelines range on other grounds.
The Eighth Circuit affirmed the denial of the motion to suppress. The court vacated his sentence and remand for resentencing, however, because Defendant does not have three prior qualifying convictions under the ACCA. The court explained that was reasonable for the officers to rely on our then-applicable precedent that dog sniffs at an interior apartment door are permissible.   Moreover, the court wrote that to be subject to higher statutory penalties under the ACCA, an individual who violates 18 U.S.C. 922(g) must have three or more prior convictions for offenses -6- that are “violent felon[ies]” or “serious drug offense[s].” 18 U.S.C. 924(e)(1). As relevant here, a serious drug offense is defined as: “an offense under State law, involving manufacturing, distributing, or possessing with intent to manufacture or distribute, a controlled substance (as defined in section 102 of the Controlled Substances Act (21 U.S.C. 802)), for which a maximum term of imprisonment of ten years or more is prescribed by law. Accordingly, the court found that Defendant’s prior offenses are not serious drug offenses under the ACCA, and the district court erred by sentencing Defendant as an armed career criminal. View "United States v. Christopher Perez" on Justia Law

Defendant was convicted by a jury of possession of a firearm by a prohibited person, in violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 922(g)(9), and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number, in violation of 18 U.S.C. Section 922(k). The district court sentenced him to 125 months’ imprisonment. On appeal, Defendant makes several arguments: first, that the district court erred in denying his request for an entrapment instruction; second, he raises a Brady claim; and third, he argues ineffective assistance of counsel.   The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that factual record establishes law enforcement and its informant merely provided Defendant an opportunity to make a sale, which revealed Defendant’s unlawful possession of the firearm that he sold to the agent.  As there is no evidence of inducement, the court was not required to give entrapment instruction.   Further, Defendant’s assertions are too speculative to support a Brady claim. The jury heard the relevant testimony and was thus aware of the conflicting recollections of the agent and the confidential informant about the events leading to the sale. Furthermore, considering the weight of evidence against Defendant on the two counts of conviction, the failure to disclose the identity of the informant’s brother did not prejudice him. Finally, the court declined to hear Defendant’s ineffective-assistance claim. The court held that it only reviews such claims on direct appeal in “exceptional cases”, and this case is not such an instance. View "United States v. Brandon Hayes" on Justia Law

After a bench trial, the district court convicted Defendant on one count each of receipt and possession of child pornography under 18 U.S.C. Section 2252A(a)(2)(A) and (5)(B) and sentenced him to 97 months imprisonment. Defendant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence to support his convictions and the district court’s application of the sentencing guidelines.The Eighth Circuit affirmed. According to Defendant, a rational jury could not have found that the evidence proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he knowingly received or possessed the child pornography found on his devices. The court explained that first, the thumbnails in Exhibits 1 to 4 support the district court’s finding that Defendant knowingly received and possessed those images or their originals. The examiner testified that a thumbnail indicates that the original of that image was in the phone’s gallery application at some point. Second, circumstantial evidence surrounding Exhibits 5, 6, and 8 to 13 supports the district court’s finding that Defendant knowingly possessed and received at least one of the images in these exhibits. Third, other evidence supports these inferences. Defendant’s devices contained thirteen child-pornography files, several suspected child-pornography files, and hundreds of other images of children—many erotic and some watermarked with child-pornography-related terms. Further, because the district court would have imposed the same sentence under Section 3553(a) factors as it did under the guidelines, any error in its application of the guidelines was harmless. View "United States v. Christopher Golden" on Justia Law

Plaintiff and other death-row prisoners in Arkansas sued the governor and a corrections official, arguing that Arkansas’s three-drug execution protocol violates the Eighth Amendment. After a bench trial, the district court found that the prisoners failed to establish a violation, and denied a motion for new trial.   The prisoners argue that the district court clearly erred in finding that they failed to demonstrate that the Arkansas execution protocol creates a substantial risk of severe pain. The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The prisoners cite expert testimony from Dr. Craig Stevens and Dr. Gail Van Norman that midazolam has a ceiling effect that occurs at a dose between 0.2 to 0.4 mg/kg. These experts relied on two medical studies, which are known by the names of their principal authors as the Inagaki study and the Miyake study. The court wrote that with no scientific consensus and a paucity of reliable scientific evidence concerning the effect of large doses of midazolam on humans, the district court did not clearly err in finding that the prisoners failed to demonstrate that the Arkansas execution protocol is sure or very likely to cause severe pain. Accordingly, the district court properly dismissed the claim under the Eighth Amendment.   Further, the prisoners failed to establish that the State’s existing method was sure or very likely to cause needless suffering, so the State was not required to consider alternative methods. The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying the motion. View "Stacey Johnson v. Asa Hutchinson" on Justia Law

Defendant was convicted of kidnapping resulting in death and conspiracy to commit kidnapping. On appeal, Defendant challenges several rulings of the district court* and the sufficiency of the evidence in support of the convictions.The Eighth Circuit affirmed. Defendant’s first argument on appeal is that the district court erred by denying his motion to suppress statements from the interviews on November 8 and 21, 2018. He contends that investigators subjected him to custodial interrogations without advising him of his rights under Miranda v. Arizona. The court concluded that there was no custodial interrogation of Defendant on November 8. Defendant responded to the FBI agent’s request for a conversation and agreed to let the agent come to his house for the meeting. The agent did not display a weapon or restrain Defendant in any way. The agent was dressed in plain clothes and allowed Defendant’s wife to sit nearby for the interview. Further, the court held that there is no indication that Defendant is particularly susceptible to undue influence: he is an adult of average intelligence who has earned an associate’s degree and is familiar with the protections afforded by the legal system due to an extensive criminal history.Moreover, the court held that the district court did not abuse its discretion by concluding that the probative value of the evidence was not substantially outweighed by a danger of unfair prejudice. Further, the court concluded that there was no error in declining to instruct the jury that the government must prove that Defendant knew in advance that death would result from the kidnapping. View "United States v. Ramon Simpson" on Justia Law

Defendant pleaded guilty to transportation of child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. Sections 2252A(a)(1) and (b)(1). At sentencing, the district court determined an advisory guidelines sentencing range of 108 to 135 months in prison, considered the 18 U.S.C. Section 3553(a) sentencing factors, and imposed a sentence of 96 months imprisonment and 20 years of supervised release. The court imposed seven special conditions of supervised release.Defendant appealed his sentence, presenting as the issue for review whether the district court abused its discretion in requiring Defendant to submit to periodic polygraph testing at the discretion of the U.S. Probation Office.The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that here, the district court did not procedurally err. It conducted a thorough individualized analysis of the sentence it was imposing. The seven special conditions of supervised release require that Defendant (5) “participate in a sex offense-specific treatment program,” and (6) “submit to periodic polygraph testing . . . to ensure that he is in compliance with the requirements of his supervision or treatment program.” In response to Defendant’s timely objection, the court carefully explained why the sentence would include this polygraph testing special condition. Moreover, the court held that Defendant has not met his burden to establish that a special condition is unreasonable. View "United States v. Reynaldo Sanchez" on Justia Law

A jury convicted Defendant of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Defendant appealed, arguing that evidence from his iPhone should have been suppressed because the government delayed unreasonably before seeking a search warrant, and that prior firearm convictions were improperly admitted under Federal Rule of Evidence 404(b). He also appealed his sentence, arguing that neither his Iowa willful injury conviction nor his two Illinois armed robbery convictions qualifies as “violent felonies” under Section 924(e). He further argued the Illinois robbery convictions were not “committed on occasions different from one another,” Section 924(e)(1), and thus constitute only one prior violent felony conviction.The Eighth Circuit affirmed. The court explained that although significantly longer delays have been upheld as not unreasonable, without question the twenty-four-day delay at issue is of concern. The court reasoned that because smartphones “retain data for long periods of time,” delay between the time a cell phone is seized and when it is searched is not likely to cause stored personal data to be lost, or data of potential evidentiary relevance to become stale. More important to the private interests at stake, Defendant was in police custody for the entire twenty-four-day period, and there is no evidence that either Defendant or anyone acting on his behalf made a request or demand for its return, or even inquired about it. Thus, the district court did not err in denying Defendant’s motion to suppress. Further, the court held that the district court properly determined that Defendant’s Section 708.4(1) willful injury conviction is an ACCA predicate violent felony. View "United States v. Darvill Bragg" on Justia Law

Defendant entered a conditional guilty plea to a charge of conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. She reserved her right to appeal an order of the district court denying her motion to suppress evidence that police seized after conducting a protective sweep of a hotel room in which she was staying. See Fed. R. Crim. P. 11(a)(2).The Eighth Circuit affirmed, concluding that the officers permissibly entered and searched the hotel room. On appeal, Defendant argues that the district court erred in denying the motion to suppress because the police lacked specific and articulable facts suggesting that a person posing a danger to the officers was located inside the hotel room. She maintains that the officers violated her rights under the Fourth Amendment by entering the hotel room without a warrant and that all evidence seized as a result of the entry should be suppressed.The court explained that a protective sweep of the hotel room was justified here as an inspection of spaces immediately adjoining the place of arrest from which an attack could be immediately launched. It is undisputed that officers were positioned in the doorway to effect the arrest, and that police crossed the threshold into the room under the authority of the warrant. Accordingly, the court held that the officers observed evidence of unlawful drug activity in plain view while conducting the protective sweep did not violate Defendant’s rights under the Fourth Amendment. View "United States v. Angela Garges" on Justia Law