United States v. Kernell

• Decision Date: 27 March 2012
• Docket Number: No. 10–6450.,10–6450.
• Citation: 667 F.3d 746
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. David C. KERNELL, Defendant–Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

667 F.3d 746

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.David C. KERNELL, Defendant–Appellant.

No. 10–6450.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: Oct. 25, 2011.Decided and Filed: Jan. 30, 2012.Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied March 27, 2012.

ARGUED: Wade V. Davies, Ritchie, Dillard, Davies & Johnson, P.C., Knoxville, Tennessee, for Appellant. Mark L. Krotoski, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., for Appellee. ON BRIEF: Wade V. Davies, Anne E. Passino, Ritchie, Dillard, Davies & Johnson, P.C., Knoxville, Tennessee, for Appellant. Mark L. Krotoski, United States Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., D. Gregory Weddle, Assistant United States Attorney, Knoxville, Tennessee, for Appellee.Before: MOORE and COLE, Circuit Judges; BECKWITH, Senior District Judge.^*

OPINION

COLE, Circuit Judge.

Defendant David Kernell was convicted of obstruction of justice under 18 U.S.C. § 1519 for deleting information from his computer that related to his effort to gain access to the email account of then-Alaska governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Section 1519, passed as part of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, prohibits the knowing destruction or alteration of any record “with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence the investigation ... of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States ... or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter or case....” Kernell argues that § 1519 is unconstitutionally vague, and that there is not sufficient evidence to support his conviction. We AFFIRM the conviction and sentence.

I.

During the 2008 Presidential election, David Kernell was a student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In September of 2008, it was reported in the New York Times that Sarah Palin, the then-governor of Alaska and Republican candidate for Vice President, used the email address “gov. palin@ yahoo. com” (“the Palin email account”) for personal and official business.

In the early morning of September 16, 2008, Kernell attempted to gain access to the Palin email account. To gain access to a Yahoo! email account without knowing the password, a user could type the user ID ¹ into the designated space on the Yahoo! home page and click the “help” link. From there, the user could access the “forgotten password” feature. The feature would prompt the user to provide the birthday, country of residence, and zip code of the user of the account. If this information were correctly provided, the user then answers a “secret question,” which had been selected when the account was opened. Upon answering the question correctly, the user would be able to create a new password, and then use that password to access the account.

Kernell used this procedure to gain access to the Palin email account. Using information publicly available on the internet, Kernell entered Governor Palin's date of birth, country of residence and zip code. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts, Kernell guessed the correct answer to the secret challenge question: “where did you meet your spouse?” Kernell then changed the password on the Palin email account to “popcorn,” and logged on to the account.

Soon after accessing the Palin email account, Kernell logged on to the internet message board “4chan.org”. 4chan is known for its culture of anonymous posting, and often contains content that is offensive or socially unacceptable. Kernell began a message thread on the /b/, or “random,” board claiming to have “hacked,” or surreptitiously accessed, the Palin email account. He supported his claim with screen shots of the Palin email account's Inbox, as well as at least one photograph of members of the Palin family taken from attachments to the emails in the account. At the end of the thread, he disclosed the new password he created for the Palin email account, allowing any user reading the thread to access the account. 4chan site administrators took down the thread soon after the password was shared.

While this first thread was still active, one anonymous 4chan user claimed to have informed the FBI of Kernell's activities. Other users encouraged Kernell to distribute the information before government officials discovered the access. Approximately an hour after Kernell initiated the thread, a 4chan user logged into the Palin email account, changed the password to freeze out other users, and informed a Palin aide that the account had been hacked.

The next day, September 17, 2008, Kernell returned to 4chan and began a new thread that began “Hello, /b/” (“the Hello post”). In this thread, Kernell took credit for hacking the Palin email account, and described in detail how he accomplished the task. Kernell claims that he disclosed the password to the 4chan community because he wanted the information “out there,” and claimed to have deleted information from his computer as a result of his fear of being investigated. Kernell also criticized the individual who alerted the Palin staffer to the hack.

Later computer forensic examinations revealed that Kernell had taken numerous actions to remove information from the computer relating to his access to the Palin email account. At some point between the initial post on 4chan and the evening of September 18, Kernell cleared the cache on his Internet Explorer browser, removing the record of websites he had visited during that period. He also uninstalled the Firefox internet browser, which more thoroughly removed the record of his internet access using that browser, and ran the disk defragmentation program on his computer, which reorganizes and cleans up the existing space on a hard drive, and has the effect of removing many of the remnants of information or files that had been deleted. Finally, Kernell deleted a series of images that he had downloaded from the Palin email account.

On the evening of September 18, 2008, the FBI contacted Kernell's father to determine Kernell's whereabouts. The next day, Kernell contacted FBI investigators and attended a brief phone meeting arranged by Kernell's attorney. Kernell called the FBI again on the evening of September 20, but never provided any information to investigators, and later on September 20 the FBI executed a search warrant for Kernell's apartment and seized his computer. The seized computer, despite the deletions, contained numerous items related to accessing the Palin email account, including a draft of the “Hello” post.

A federal grand jury indicted Kernell on four separate offenses. Count One alleged that Kernell committed identity theft in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1028(a)(7). Count Two alleged that Kernell committed wire fraud in relation to improperly obtaining electronic information belonging to Palin in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1343. Count Three alleged Kernell improperly obtained information from a protected computer in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2)(C). Finally, Count Four alleged Kernell obstructed justice stemming from the deletion of information on his computer, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a component of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002.

Before trial, Kernell asserted that Count Four should be dismissed, arguing among other things that the statute was unconstitutional. When this argument was rejected by the district court, Kernell further argued, in a motion for judgment of acquittal at trial, that the government failed produce sufficient evidence to sustain a conviction under § 1519. This too was denied, and the case went to the jury. The jury returned an acquittal on Count Two, deadlocked on Count One, found Kernell guilty on the obstruction of justice charge in Count Four and a lesser-included offense under Count Three. Kernell again moved for acquittal with regard to the obstruction of justice charge, restating the arguments from his previous motions. His motion was denied.

Kernell appeals his conviction, seeking only the dismissal of Count Four.

II.

We review the district court's denial of Kernell's challenge to the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 1519 de novo. United States v. Krumrei, 258 F.3d 535, 537 (6th Cir.2001) (quoting United States v. Hill, 167 F.3d 1055, 1063 (6th Cir.1999)). A criminal statute is unconstitutionally vague if it “defines an offense in such a way that ordinary people cannot understand what is prohibited or if it encourages arbitrary or discriminatory enforcement.” Krumrei, 258 F.3d at 537 (quoting United States v. Avant, 907 F.2d 623, 625 (6th Cir.1990) (internal quotation marks omitted)). For challenges to the statute that do not implicate First Amendment concerns, the “defendant bears the burden of establishing that the statute is vague as applied to his particular case, not merely that the statute could be construed as vague in some hypothetical situation.” Id. at 537 (citing Avant, 907 F.2d at 625).

For appeals from a denial of a judgment of acquittal based on the sufficiency of the evidence, “the standard of review is whether, after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found essential elements of the crime[.]” United States v. Kuehne, 547 F.3d 667, 696 (6th Cir.2008) (quoting United States v. Jones, 102 F.3d 804, 807 (6th Cir.1996) (alteration in original)).

A. Standing/Actual Knowledge of the FBI Investigation

The government argues that Kernell does not have standing to challenge the constitutionality of 18 U.S.C. § 1519 as facially void for vagueness because the statute clearly applies to Kernell's conduct. Even if a statute might be vague as it relates to other, hypothetical defendants, courts will not entertain vagueness challenges on behalf of a defendant whose conduct clearly falls within the ambit of the statute. “[T]he dispositive point here is that the statutory terms are clear in their application to the plaintiffs' proposed conduct, which means that plaintiffs' vagueness challenge must fail.” Holder v. Humanitarian...