## Facts

- Elliot Duke pleaded guilty in federal court to receipt of child pornography involving his computer.
- The district court sentenced Duke to a term of imprisonment followed by supervised release.
- As part of supervised release, the district court imposed a special condition that barred Duke for life from accessing computers capable of Internet access.
- The condition was unconditional, functioning as a blanket prohibition on Internet use rather than a restriction tied to probation approval, monitoring, or specific types of online activity.
- Duke appealed, arguing that a total Internet ban is unlawfully broad and imposes a greater restraint on liberty than federal supervised-release law permits.

## Issues

1. Whether the district court lawfully imposed, as a special condition of supervised release, an unconditional lifetime ban on accessing Internet-capable computers for a defendant convicted of receiving child pornography.

## Decision

- The Fifth Circuit vacated the challenged special condition and remanded for further proceedings.
- The court concluded that a blanket, unconditional lifetime prohibition on Internet-capable computer access was broader than necessary to serve the statutory goals of supervised release.
- The court indicated that restrictions on Internet use may be permissible when properly tailored, such as limits tied to supervision, monitoring, or approval, but a total lifetime ban required stronger justification and narrower fit than the record supplied.

## Legal Principles

- Special conditions of supervised release must satisfy 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d): they must be reasonably related to the sentencing factors in § 3553(a), impose no greater deprivation of liberty than reasonably necessary, and be consistent with Sentencing Commission policy statements.
- Conditions restricting access to computers or the Internet must be tailored to the defendant’s history and the offense conduct; broad bans are disfavored when narrower tools (approval requirements, monitoring, filtering, device restrictions, or treatment-related conditions) can address risk.
- Lifetime supervised-release restrictions demand careful justification because of their duration and effect on lawful daily activity (work, education, communication, and access to information).
- Appellate review of supervised-release conditions generally focuses on whether the district court abused its discretion; when a defendant did not object below, review may proceed under plain-error standards, but unlawfully broad conditions may still warrant vacatur.

## Conclusion

The Fifth Circuit held that an unconditional lifetime ban on using Internet-capable computers, imposed as a supervised-release condition after a child-pornography conviction, was overbroad under the statutory limits governing supervised release, vacated that condition, and sent the case back for the district court to consider a narrower, better-justified restriction.


United States v. Duke, 788 F.3d 392 (2015)