United States v. Line
| Docket Number | 22-13904 |
| Decision Date | 01 November 2023 |
| Parties | UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. DENNIS LEE LINE, Defendant-Appellant. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit |
DO NOT PUBLISH
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida D.C. Docket No. 6:22-cr-00050-WWB-DCI-1 Before NEWSOM, GRANT, and LAGOA, Circuit Judges.
Dennis Line, a convicted sex offender, appeals his conviction for attempted enticement of a minor to engage in sexual activity. On appeal, Line argues that the district court abused its discretion when it admitted evidence of his former teaching career. After careful review, we affirm.
A grand jury returned an indictment charging Line with one count of attempting to entice a minor to engage in sexual activity, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b). Before trial, Line moved in limine to exclude "the fact that Mr. Line was formerly employed as a schoolteacher." His argument was twofold. First, he contended, "the fact that [he] was a previously a teacher is not relevant to prove any material fact at issue in this case." And second, Line posited even if his teaching career were relevant, "it must be excluded because its probative value is substantially outweighed by the danger of unfair prejudice." The district court granted the motion in part and denied it in part, allowing the government to introduce Line's statement to law enforcement where he mentions the fact that he was a teacher and never had any issues, but requiring the government to redact certain portions of a written statement that were cumulative. At trial, the government elicited the following facts.
Line, a fifty-three-year-old man, created a profile on a dating application called Badoo. On the Badoo profile, he said that his name was Stephen and described himself as fifty years old. From "Stephen's" account, Line struck up a conversation with "Amber," whose profile said she was a forty-one-year-old woman. After they started chatting Amber asked Line, "[Y]o[u] ok if I am younger[?]," to which he replied, "Absolutely okay." Amber then told Line that she was only fifteen years old and a freshman in high school. Line replied, but he kept chatting with Amber anyway, at one point urging her, "You can at least tell me that you're 18." In reality, Amber was an Orange County Sheriff's Office detective, conducting a child-predator sting operation.
Line pressed Amber about her sexual experience, asking and "How many positions did you try?" He then told her that he could "teach [her] stuff....anything [she] want[s]," and described specific sex acts that he enjoyed. Line acknowledged that asking Amber for oral sex would be "illegal, girl, as much as I would love it," but then assured her that if they got together to "experiment and have a little fun," he would Line encouraged Amber to send him pictures of herself, and finally propositioned her "let's definitely meet tonight." After Amber agreed to meet up Line reassured her, saying, The two then made a plan to meet that night near a local Boston Market restaurant and continued to discuss the various sex acts Line wanted to perform with Amber. They also had a three-minute phone call during which Line confessed that his "biggest worry" was that Amber was
Around 11 p.m. on February 9, 2022, Line pulled up to Boston Market as planned, where Orange County Sheriff's Office deputies were waiting to arrest him. During a post-Miranda interview, Line admitted that he was "pretty sure" he knew why he was being questioned and that he had been "texting somebody that I shouldn't have been texting with; a minor, stupid, like, I have some issues." One of the detectives asked what he meant by "minor," and Line specified that "the girl said she was 15." Although Line claimed he "would never have done anything" if he had actually met "Amber," he acknowledged that he had discussed meeting up with her to kiss and have oral sex and admitted that his conduct was illegal. He also conceded that it "looks really bad" that, while he had participated in sexually flirtatious conversations with several adults he met on dating apps, he had only ever tried to meet the one person he believed to be a child.
Despite all these concessions, Line still insisted (to the detectives who interviewed him and again at trial) that "it's all fictional to me, it's all, like, not real." "It's a game of attention," he said, "the game of being at a different place, making your life different." Similarly, during his interrogation, Line wrote a letter to his wife, apologizing for his actions and explaining that he was using dating apps to make friends and to get attention and that talking to strangers he met online was "almost like a video game." When the interrogating detective asked Line if this was "a pattern or something that you're going to do continuously, preying on, on children," Line invoked his twenty-eight-year teaching career, swore he "never had an issue" in all those years, and implored the detective to "look at my record."
A few days after his arrest, Line posted a public message on his Facebook account, directed at his former colleagues. In that post, Line confessed that he "made an unthinkable choice a few days ago, that "[i]t was the most embarrassing and humiliating thing I have ever done," that he was "responsible for what [he] did and must now pay the consequences," and that he was "truly sorry." Also in that post, Line identified by name a list of schools where he had worked, addressing directly the "students, parents, and teachers" of those schools, and stating,
After two days of evidence and just over an hour of deliberations, the jury returned a guilty verdict. Line was later sentenced to 120 months' imprisonment and ten years of supervised release. This appeal follows.
"We review evidentiary rulings only for an abuse of discretion." Sowers v. R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., 975 F.3d 1112, 1122 (11th Cir. 2020). "An abuse of discretion arises when the district court's decision rests upon a clearly erroneous finding of fact, an errant conclusion of law, or an improper application of law to fact." United States v. Smith, 459 F.3d 1276, 1295 (11th Cir. 2006) (quoting United States v. Baker, 432 F.3d 1189, 1202 (11th Cir. 2005)). "Because 'we recognize a significant range of choice for the district court on evidentiary issues,' our review of such rulings is very limited and 'we defer to the district court's decisions to a considerable extent.'" United States v. Akwuba, 7 F.4th 1299, 1313 (11th Cir. 2021) (alterations adopted) (quoting United States v. Brown, 415 F.3d 1257, 1264-65 (11th Cir. 2005)). We need not reverse a conviction if the evidentiary error "had no substantial influence on the outcome and sufficient evidence uninfected by error supports the verdict." United States v. Fortenberry, 971 F.2d 717, 722 (11th Cir. 1992); accord Goulah v. Ford Motor Co., 118 F.3d 1478, 1483 (11th Cir. 1997) ("We will not overturn an evidentiary ruling unless the moving party proves a substantial prejudicial effect."). We determine whether an error had substantial influence on the outcome by weighing the record as a whole. See United States v. Montalvo-Murillo, 495 U.S. 711, 722 (1990).
Evidence is relevant if "it has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without...
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