A federal appeals court on Wednesday reversed the conviction of a Tulsa man who had been sentenced in 2009 to 11 years in prison after being found guilty of knowingly receiving child pornography.
A three-judge panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that the prosecution did not offer sufficient evidence to prove that Terry Brian Dobbs knowingly received the images that formed the basis of his conviction.
Dobbs, 53, argued that he never knowingly received or attempted to receive the two images that were submitted to the jury during his November 2008 trial.
In April 2006, U.S. Postal inspectors seized Dobbs’ computer in connection with a search warrant issued in an unrelated fraud investigation, according to the opinion. The judges wrote that a forensics specialist discovered more than 150 images of child pornography in the hard drive’s temporary Internet files folder.
During the trial the district court initially admitted 17 images but that number was winnowed down to two when the prosecution failed to provide adequate evidence that 15 of the images had traveled in interstate commerce, according to the opinion.
On Wednesday, the appellate court found the “government presented no evidence that Mr. Dobbs actually saw the two images on his monitor, such that he would have had the ability to exercise control over them.”
At Dobbs’ February 2009 sentencing, U.S. District Judge Gregory Frizzell was able to consider relevant conduct beyond what the jury
saw. He found that at least 150 illegal images were involved. Assistant U.S. Attorney Susan Morgan said then that some of the material was “beyond sadistic” and evidently was found by Dobbs’ use of Internet search terms that were “disturbing, to say the least.”
Frizzell noted then that one image featured an adult man having sex with a baby, and he enhanced Dobbs’ sentence for possessing some sadistic images.