DISCLAIMER: The following unofficial case summaries are prepared by the clerk's office
as a courtesy to the reader. They are not part of the opinion of the court.
071881P.pdf 03/05/2009 United States v. Jason Inman
U.S. Court of Appeals Case No: 07-1881
U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri - St. Louis
[PUBLISHED] [Colloton, Author, with Shepherd, Circuit Judge, and
Erickson, District Judge]
Criminal case - criminal law. Actions of defendant's co-workers in
searching his computer were the acts of private citizens and were not
subject to the Fourth Amendment; where a statutory element of an
offense is included in the indictment but erroneously omitted from the
instructions given the jury, and the evidence is insufficient to establish
the unobjected-to element used instead, the conviction may be affirmed
against a sufficiency of the evidence challenge where the evidence is so
overwhelming or incontrovertible that there is no reasonable doubt that
any rational jury would have found the government proved the statutory
element; here, while the actual jurisdictional element of 18 U.S.C. Sec.
2252(a)(5)(B) was not charged to the jury, defendant's conviction must
be upheld because there is no reasonable doubt that the items defendant
used to produce the pornography - his hard drive and DVDs - traveled in
interstate commerce as the evidence produced at trial showed the DVDs
and the drive were produced outside Missouri.