Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc
Abstract
Defendants convicted of child-sex crimes across the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit have brought a number of appeals in recent years claiming that portions of their sentences must be vacated. They assert that the district court judges that sentenced them failed to abide by their statutory obligations under 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d) to appropriately impose certain restrictions on their ability to consume pornographic material or use the internet following their release from prison. While the Fourth Circuit tried to address this issue in 2020, appeals in the following years revealed that some district court judges were still having their impositions of special conditions challenged on either vagueness or First Amendment grounds.
In response to this problem, this Note surveys the mechanics behind special conditions of supervised release, the role of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts in providing guidance to judges to help them decide when to impose these special conditions, and Fourth Circuit trends in upholding or vacating special conditions related to pornography or the internet. It then synthesizes academic literature addressing the scope of potential vagueness and First Amendment concerns and proposes that adding a decision tree to the Administrative Office’s suggestions for imposing special conditions could help judges better decide whether a special condition related to pornography or the internet is appropriate.
Recommended Citation
Curcio, Nicholas S.
(2024)
"Getting It Right the First Time: Making Child Sex Offender Sentencing in the Fourth Circuit More Efficient with a New Methodology for Crafting Content- Based Special Conditions of Supervised Release,"
Vanderbilt Law Review En Banc: Vol. 77:
Iss.
1, Article 9.
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/vlreb/vol77/iss1/9