A US federal judge – who imposed draconian surveillance measures against a man charged and later convicted and paroled in connection with the January 6 events – is clearly unimpressed by the ruling of a US Court of Appeals, that recently overturned his decision.
Senior District Judge Reggie Walton now wants the controversy officially revisited, so he scheduled a new hearing date for June 4 in a bid to make his original order for Daniel Goodwyn’s computer to be surveilled for “mis/disinformation” stick.
Early in April, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia announced that the order to monitor and “inspect” Goodwyn’s computer for “mis/disinformation” was the result of the district court having “plainly erred.”
Goodwyn (described in reports as a citizen journalist) was convicted on a single trespassing misdemeanor count based on him spending 36 seconds inside the Capitol on the day.
Goodwyn was subsequently arrested and sentenced by Judge Walton to two months in prison, but that was not all – his computer was to be “monitored and inspected” during his parole.
This last bit of the ruling was too much for the circuit court, which overturned it earlier in the month. The ruling said Walton “plainly erred in imposing the computer-monitoring condition without considering whether it was ‘reasonably related’ to the relevant sentencing factors and involved ‘no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary’ to achieve the purposes behind sentencing.”
But now Walton is trying to once again impose surveillance of Goodwyn’s computer, ordering him to “show cause” as to why that should not be happening.
This might even be seen as testing the presumption of innocence, but Goodwyn’s attorney Carol Stewart is happy to point out that, “the First (free speech) and Fourth (unwarranted searches protections) Amendments have not been wiped out of the US Constitution yet” – calling for the computer monitoring measure to be dismissed once and for all as unconstitutional, and irrelevant.
“The application of computer monitoring conditions to conduct invasive searches is covered extensively by case law, where the computer had to be used for the crime. And use could not have just been incidental or casual. The computer had to be integral to the crime,” said Stewart to the Epoch Times.
And it turns out – just as Judge Walton, who threw the book at Goodwyn not only for his participation in the January 6 events but it seems (at least where the “computer surveillance” measure is concerned) mostly for him talking to Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News – the judge himself has his own history of appearing in the media and making what can be viewed as controversial statements.
On CNN, that is, as a vocal and controversial critic of Donald Trump.
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