Published on: Sunday, January 24, 2021

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Friday ruled that a supervised release condition that required a defendant who pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography to get his probation officer’s approval before taking “any” job was overbroad and must be stricken.

The court found that the district court’s all-encompassing restriction lacks an appropriate nexus to the nature and circumstances of the defendant’s offense. Specifically, the condition also leaves the probation officer “with completely unguided discretion,” the court said. The probation officer should be instructed to approve employment opportunities that create minimal risk of problematic contact with children, it said.

The condition was vacated and the case remanded for the district court to craft more precisely an employment restriction condition that bears a nexus to the defendant's particular misconduct “without jeopardizing the salient goal of safeguarding children’s safety.”

The case is United States v. Hamilton, No. 19-4852 (4th Cir. Jan. 22, 2021).

Earlier this month, the Fourth Circuit struck conditions of supervised release banning legal pornography and internet access as overbroad, toorestrictive, and not "reasonably related" to conditions of supervised release. See previous coverage here.