164288P.pdf   04/04/2018  United States  v.  Thomas Peterson
   U.S. Court of Appeals Case No:  16-4288
   U.S. District Court for the District of Nebraska - Lincoln   
   [PUBLISHED] [Shepherd, Author, with Benton and Kelly, Circuit Judges] 
   Criminal case - Criminal law and Sentencing. Evidence was sufficient to 
   support defendant's convictions on charges that he deprived his female 
   probationers of their civil rights by forcing them to engage in 
   inappropriate sexual acts and contacts while they were under his 
   supervision; the evidence was sufficient to show the victims acquiesced to 
   his sexual advances as a result of his abuse of his state law authority; 
   the conduct was egregious enough to support a Fourteenth Amendment 
   substantive due process claim; no error in denying defendant's theory of 
   the defense instruction which would have instructed the jury that in order 
   to convict him, he must have known both that he used his position of power 
   to cause the victims to submit to his demands and that the victims 
   consented because of that influence; assuming the district court erred in 
   calculating defendant's guidelines range, the error was harmless as the 
   court stated it would impose the same sentence regardless of the 
   underlying range; sentence was not substantively unreasonable.