United States v. Charles R. Dauray

215 F.3d 257 · Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit · 2000

Facts

On May 13, 1994, an officer approached Charles Dauray's car in a state park and found him in possession of thirteen unbound pictures of minors. These pictures were pieces of magazine pages and photocopies of those pages. Dauray was aware of the contents of these visual depictions and knew that genitalia of minors appeared in each of them. The visual depictions had been transported in interstate commerce. A federal grand jury later indicted Dauray for possessing child pornography.

Procedural history

Dauray was convicted following a jury trial in the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut. The district court had denied Dauray’s pretrial motion to dismiss the indictment, concluding that the pictures were "other matter" and refusing to apply the rule of lenity. Dauray was sentenced to 36 months of imprisonment. He then appealed from the judgment of conviction to this court.

Issue

The legal question is whether individual pictures are considered "other matter which contain any visual depiction" under the meaning of 18 U.S.C. § 2252(a)(4)(B). The court also considered whether the rule of lenity should apply to resolve the ambiguity in the statute's wording as applied to Dauray's possession of three or more pictures.

Holding

The court reversed Dauray's conviction and directed that the indictment be dismissed. It held that the wording of the statute was ambiguous as applied to the possession of individual pictures, and therefore the rule of lenity must apply to resolve this ambiguity in Dauray's favor.

Rule

The rule of lenity requires that ambiguities in a criminal statute be resolved in the defendant’s favor. This rule ensures fair warning by applying a criminal statute only to conduct clearly covered. It is a doctrine of last resort, applied when the statute's text, structure, legislative history, and motivating policies fail to establish that the government’s position is unambiguously correct, leaving a reasonable doubt about the statute’s intended scope. The court found that despite diligent efforts to construe the statute, it could be read to either support or defeat the indictment, making it grievously ambiguous.

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