US v. Brewer, No. 09-3898

Sex Offender Registration Conviction Affirmed

In US v. Brewer, No. 09-3898, the court affirmed defendant's conviction for knowingly failing to register as a sex offender where 1) defendant raised an issue of fact -- whether he knowingly violated 18 U.S.C. section 2250 -- not an issue of law warranting dismissal of the indictment; and 2) because Congress deliberately chose to impose longer terms of supervised release on persons convicted of certain sex offenses, including Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act offenses, the district court's imposition of a fifteen-year term was not a substantively unreasonable abuse of discretion in this case.

As the court wrote:  "Kevin Lamont Brewer was charged with knowingly failing to register as a sex offender in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2250, part of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA). He entered a conditional guilty plea, reserving the right to appeal the district court's1 denial of his two motions to dismiss the indictment. He now appeals, arguing that the indictment should be dismissed, and that the district court imposed a substantively unreasonable fifteen-year term of supervised release. We affirm."

Related Resources

• Read the Eighth Circuit's Decision in US v. Brewer, No. 09-3898