## Facts

- William Irey repeatedly traveled to Cambodia over roughly four to five years and sexually abused numerous young girls, including children as young as four.
- He photographed and videotaped the abuse, creating highly explicit child pornography.
- He distributed the images online and communicated with a child pornography website through incriminating emails.
- A search of his home uncovered a hard drive containing about 1,200 images of abuse involving at least fifty underage victims, plus additional explicit materials.
- Irey pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of sexual exploitation of children, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2251(c).
- The advisory Sentencing Guidelines, limited by the statutory maximum, called for a 30-year sentence.

## Issues

1. Whether the district court abused its discretion under 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a) by imposing a 210-month sentence—substantially below the advisory Guidelines cap of 30 years—making the sentence substantively unreasonable.

## Decision

- The en banc Eleventh Circuit vacated the 210-month sentence as substantively unreasonable.
- The court held the district court abused its discretion by giving insufficient weight to the seriousness, scope, and harm of the offense and to deterrence and punishment considerations under § 3553(a).
- The court remanded with instructions to impose the 30-year statutory maximum (the top of the advisory Guidelines range) and to retain lifetime supervised release.

## Legal Principles

- Appellate review of sentencing includes substantive reasonableness review under an abuse-of-discretion standard; deference does not bar correction of clear errors in judgment in weighing § 3553(a) factors.
- A sentence may be vacated as substantively unreasonable when the district court assigns disproportionate weight to mitigating personal characteristics and underweights offense seriousness, just punishment, and deterrence.
- In extraordinary child-exploitation cases with extensive victimization and production/distribution of child pornography, a major downward variance from the Guidelines maximum can fall outside the range of permissible sentences under § 3553(a).

## Conclusion

The en banc court concluded that the district court’s 210-month sentence was unreasonably lenient given the prolonged, repeated abuse of many young victims and the worldwide dissemination of the resulting pornography, and it required resentencing to the 30-year statutory maximum.


United States v. Irey, 612 F.3d 1160 (11th Cir. 2010) (en banc)