Patrick Edward Doyle hooks up with a minor on a dating app -- she allegedly showed him a fake i.d. that showed that she was an adult -- and has explicit pictures of their hookup on his phone. He gets prosecuted and convicted on one count of possessing child pornography, and is sentenced to the statutory maximum of 10 years by Judge Battaglia (down here in San Diego) notwithstanding "his limited criminal history,
his family support, and his numerous letters of support." The Ninth Circuit affirms.
It's a lengthy sentence. I would like to know more. Did the victim, or anyone else, deny showing Doyle a fake identification? How old was she? (I believe she's a teenager, since otherwise the statutory maximum would be 20 years, but not sure if she's 17, 13, or somewhere in between.) Was this Doyle first offense? (I know it's his first child porn conviction, since, again, the maximum would be higher otherwise, and know that he has "limited" criminal history, but are there other non-pornography convictions?) There's reference in the opinion to pictures of "[the victim] and other unidentified girls engaged in explicit sexual
conduct" beyond the pictures of Doyle and the victim. Does that mean that there are pictures of Doyle having sex with other underage girls, or the victim having sex with other underage girls, or just other underage girls solo? (That matters, I think; if they are indeed pictures of Doyle and other girls, that shows an even larger scope of predation.) The opinion by Judge Brown, sitting by designation from the Southern District of Texas, leaves all of this unexplored.
One might perhaps think that Judge Brown leaves out these details in order to avoid mentioning sensitive subjects or potentially traumatizing the reader. Yet I am fairly confident that's not the reason, if only given one of the paragraphs that Judge Brown includes later in the opinion. Trigger warning: Stop reading this paragraph and skip to the next one if you don't want to read some really graphic stuff. Ready? Here's what I am talking about (from the opinion): "The videos and
photographs of MV here are “abhorrent” and
“reprehensible” to the extreme. Id. One eighteen-second
video shows MV “performing fellatio on what we believe to
be the defendant and [sic] his bed, in his house.” Another
video shows an “unknown minor female” as she “anally
penetrates herself with a razor, the handle end of a razor,
where she then pulls the razor in and out. And there is
apparent feces on the razor. At one point in time she licks the
razor.”"
Oh my God.
The opinion hold that the district judge committed error by not reviewing these clips before showing them to a jury, but that the error was harmless, notwithstanding the fact that -- and this is incredibly unusual, I believe -- "'one of the jurors broke down crying' after seeing
the child-pornography videos and a different juror requested
counseling the day after the trial ended."
Intense material indeed.
So, on the one hand, I ended the opinion simultaneously wanting more information and yet wishing that I had perhaps been told less.
