19-2119-cr United States v. Thomas Alonzo Bolin UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE SECOND CIRCUIT August Term, 2019 (Argued: May 19, 2020 Decided: September 24, 2020) Docket No. 19-2119 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Appellee, v. THOMAS ALONZO BOLIN, AKA PETER VINCENT, Defendant-Appellant. Before: SACK, WESLEY, and CHIN, Circuit Judges. Defendant-appellant Thomas Alonzo Bolin appeals the supervised release portion of his July 3, 2019, judgment of conviction in the United States District Court for the Western District of New York (David G. Larimer, Judge). He was convicted of making a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation to FBI agents in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1001(a)(2). On appeal, he challenges two of the special conditions of supervised release imposed by the district court. The first prohibits him from posting on, or uploading to, any internet website, "or transmit[ting], by any electronic means," a statement that "promotes or endorses violence." App'x at 122. The second prohibits him from using or possessing a computer or other internet-capable device without participating in a monitoring program operated by the U.S. Probation Office. Bolin asserts that neither condition is "reasonably related" to his crime of conviction and therefore that both conditions run afoul of the provision of the United States Sentencing Guidelines — section 5D1.3(b)(1) — that governs a court's imposition of discretionary conditions of supervised release. Bolin also argues that the first condition unduly infringes upon his First Amendment right to freedom of speech. We reject Bolin's first argument, concluding that both challenged conditions of Bolin's supervised release satisfy the "reasonably related" requirements of section 5D1.3(b)(1) and accord with our caselaw interpreting that provision. With respect to Bolin's second argument, however, we conclude that because of the vagueness of the condition prohibiting him from engaging in violence-promoting speech online in its present form, it infringes upon his rights to free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Accordingly, the judgment of the district court is: AFFIRMED IN PART; VACATED AND REMANDED IN PART. TIFFANY H. LEE, Assistant United States Attorney, for James P. Kennedy Jr., United States Attorney for the Western District of New York; 2 JAY S. OVSIOVITCH, Federal Public Defender's Office, Western District of New York, for Defendant-Appellant. SACK, Circuit Judge: On March 12, 2019, the defendant-appellant, Thomas Alonzo Bolin, uploaded to Facebook a photograph of himself wearing a red devil mask and pointing the barrel of a shotgun at the camera. He was living in the Rochester suburb of Greece, New York at the time. Three days later, and thousands of miles away, a gunman in Christchurch, New Zealand, attacked two mosques, killing 50 people and injuring dozens of others. Minutes before the attacks, the gunman distributed online a manifesto he had written expressing racist, anti-immigrant, and white-supremacist sentiments. During the attacks, the gunman used a small camera strapped to his head to livestream the atrocities via his Facebook account. The manifesto and video quickly spread on social media websites around the world to Bolin in ...
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