United States v. Landreneau

• Decision Date: 22 July 2020
• Docket Number: No. 19-50297,19-50297
• Citation: 967 F.3d 443
• Parties: UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee v. Christopher Shawn LANDRENEAU, Defendant - Appellant
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit

967 F.3d 443

UNITED STATES of America, Plaintiff - Appellee

v.Christopher Shawn LANDRENEAU, Defendant - Appellant

No. 19-50297

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

FILED July 22, 2020

Joseph H. Gay, Jr., Zachary Carl Richter, Assistant U.S. Attorneys, U.S. Attorney's Office, Western District of Texas, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

John Dennis Hester, Federal Public Defender's Office, Southern District of Texas, Houston, TX, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before WIENER, STEWART, and WILLETT, Circuit Judges.

CARL E. STEWART, Circuit Judge:

Christopher Shawn Landreneau ("Landreneau") pled guilty to one count of possession of child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(4). A week before sentencing, Landreneau moved to withdraw his guilty plea—the district court denied his motion to withdraw. At sentencing, the district court applied several sentencing enhancements. Landreneau appealed the application of two of those enhancements—a two-level enhancement for possessing child pornography with the intent to distribute and a five-level enhancement for the pattern of sexual abuse against minors. For the reasons given below, we AFFIRM the district court's denial of Landreneau's motion to withdraw and its application of the challenged sentencing enhancements.

I. FACTUAL AND PROCEDURAL BACKGROUND

A. Facts

The Underlying Facts and the Guilty Plea

The Landreneau investigation spanned two states. Louisiana law enforcement officials first received an anonymous cyber-tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children ("NCMEC") indicating that a Google mail ("Gmail") user attempted to distribute eighteen files of suspected child pornography on April 6, 2017. The flagged email account was OTESSArsenal@gmail.com. An open source database check for the Gmail account led to a Facebook account for a paranormal nonprofit company called OTESS. The Facebook page indicated Shawn Landreneau and Nadine Stanford, Landreneau's wife, as the owners of the company.¹ Additional open source database searches identified Shawn Landreneau as Christopher Shawn Landreneau, the defendant–appellant. The presentencing report ("PSR") notes that Landreneau has a series of tattoos on his body, including a tattoo of the word "Otess" on his back.

Louisiana law enforcement officials conducted additional open source database checks for Landreneau and found a Port Barre, Louisiana address associated with his name. Port Barre officials executed a search warrant for the residence, but found it empty. The owner of the rental property told the officers that Landreneau moved to Texas and where he believed Landreneau was employed.

Texas law enforcement then took over the investigation. After confirming his place of employment, the Texas Department of Public Safety ("DPS") obtained Landreneau's new address in Midland, Texas and contact information. DPS agents surveilled his residence and observed a car with Louisiana tags that was registered to Christopher Shawn Landreneau. DPS also conducted a criminal history database check that indicated that Landreneau was arrested for two counts of first degree rape in Louisiana on March 22, 2018 for alleged offenses in June 2017 and October 2017. Both parties indicate that these charges are still pending.

On July 30, 2018, DPS agents met with Landreneau at his job. Landreneau voluntarily went with the agents to the local DPS office where they asked him for his cell phone, an Apple iPhone S. According to his plea agreement, Landreneau gave written consent to the search of his residence, laptop, and personal and work cell phones. According to the PSR, "Landreneau attempted to take his phone from agents while pressing the home button. Agents knew it was possible to reset the phone to factory settings by pressing the home button several times, so they forcefully removed the phone from Landreneau." While Landreneau spoke with DPS agents at the DPS office, other agents went to Landreneau's residence and met with Landreneau's wife, Nadine. After the agents detailed the purpose of the visit, Nadine consented to their search of the residence wherein they recovered an Acer laptop and a Samsung cell phone. A search of those devices yielded no contraband. After his interview with the agents, Landreneau's laptop and Samsung phone were returned to him.

However, a search of his iPhone revealed 592 images of child pornography depicting lewd sexual acts of children under the age of thirteen, with some as young as five years old. In a post-Miranda interview, Landreneau admitted to downloading images of child pornography. He said that he used a website called "link share" and clicked on links containing child pornography and saved the images on his iPhone. He said that he only used the iPhone to download images of child pornography and that he "gets excited when [he] look[s] at that."

On July 31, 2018, Landreneau was charged with possession of child pornography in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(4). He was denied bail and was eventually indicted by a grand jury for one count of possession of child pornography. Landreneau pled guilty to that charge on October 16, 2018 and affirmed that he was pleading guilty because he was "in fact, guilty and for no other reason."

B. Procedural History

The PSR reflected several recommended offense-level adjustments for sentencing. Starting at a base offense level of eighteen, the PSR calculated and recommended an increase of nineteen points which resulted in an offense level of thirty-seven. The PSR also recommended a three-point reduction for Landreneau's accepting responsibility, and for pleading guilty, which resulted in a final total offense level of thirty-four. Landreneau objected in writing to two of the recommended enhancements which accounted for seven of the nineteen points. The first was a two-level enhancement applied for the intended distribution of child pornography. The second was a five-level enhancement applied for engaging in a pattern of sexual abuse or exploitation of a minor. The basis for the five-level enhancement was two pending charges of first degree rape of victims under the age of thirteen, originating in Evangeline Parish, Louisiana on June 28, 2017 and October 5, 2017, respectively, that were noted in paragraphs twenty-seven and twenty-eight of the PSR.

After pleading guilty, the district court scheduled Landreneau's sentencing hearing to be held on January 15, 2019. Landreneau filed a motion to continue the deadline to object to the PSR on December 20, 2018, which was granted. On that same day, the Court rescheduled the sentencing hearing for February 14, 2019.

Motion to Withdraw Guilty Plea

On February 7, 2019, a week before the rescheduled sentencing hearing, Landreneau moved to withdraw his guilty plea. He argued that "his plea was the result of not understanding the ramifications of his decision [to plead guilty]" because he learned from "other inmates that the conviction rate of the U.S. government is extremely high, and [he] would receive a longer sentence if convicted after a trial." After a February 14 motion hearing, Magistrate Judge Ronald C. Griffin recommended that the motion to withdraw be denied. Landreneau objected to the magistrate judge's report and recommendation, which was ultimately adopted by the district court on February 23. The PSR was then amended to reflect that Landreneau maintained his innocence. The amended PSR removed the three-point reduction which brought his total offense level back to a level thirty-seven.

Sentencing Hearing

The sentencing hearing was reset for March 27, 2019. At sentencing, the district court addressed two unresolved objections to the recommended sentencing enhancements, which were Landreneau's objection to the two-level enhancement for distribution of child pornography and the five-level enhancement for pattern of behavior of the sexual abuse or exploitation of a minor. On the distribution enhancement, Landreneau argued that the evidence was insufficient to support that enhancement because the draft email referenced in the cyber-tip was not provided in discovery. The government argued that the PSR sufficiently provided all of the evidence it had to substantiate the distribution enhancement. The district court agreed with the government and overruled Landreneau's objection to the distribution enhancement.

With respect to the pattern of abuse enhancement, Landreneau presented two witnesses, Holly Chapman and his wife, Nadine. Holly Chapman is Landreneau's personal friend and the mother of a child who is friends with Landreneau's daughter. Chapman's daughter, E.C., is one of the two teenagers who brought the rape allegations against Landreneau. Chapman testified that she does not believe that Landreneau raped her daughter because, in her view, Landreneau's ex-wife, April, spitefully coaxed her child into making false accusations of rape against Landreneau in response to her bitter divorce from Landreneau. When Nadine testified, she asserted the same position, that she did not believe the allegations of rape against Landreneau, brought by his own daughter T.L. and her friend, E.C. (Chapman's daughter), because April convinced them to say that Landreneau raped them.

The district court overruled Landreneau's objection to the pattern of abuse enhancement, stating that neither witness was credible because they did not accept that Landreneau was guilty for possessing child pornography, despite his guilty plea. In turn, the district court stated that his credibility determination of those witnesses in tandem with the collective evidence before it was enough to satisfy the preponderance of the evidence standard with respect to the pattern of abuse enhancement. When the district court asked Landreneau if he had anything else to say before the sentence was pronounced, Landreneau only said "I'm innocent" and limited any responses to any follow-up questions from the court to a bare "Yes, sir."

Ultimately, the district court declared a total...