United States v. Beckmann’s Empirical Analysis

Citation profile

11 federal appellate · 1 state decisions

Most-quoted passages

The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 18 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.

1. “[D]istrict courts might, as a starting point, determine the amount of the victim's losses caused by the continuing traffic in the victim's images (excluding, of course, any remote losses like the hypothetical car accident described above, see supra , at 1721), then set an award of restitution in consideration of factors that bear on the relative causal significance of the defendant's conduct in producing those losses. These could include the number of past criminal defendants found to have contributed to the victim's general losses ; reasonable predictions of the number of future offenders likely to be caught and convicted for crimes contributing to the victim's general losses; any available and reasonably reliable estimate of the broader number of offenders involved (most of whom will, of course, never be caught or convicted); whether the defendant reproduced or distributed images of the victim; whether the defendant had any connection to the initial production of the images; how many images of the victim the defendant possessed; and other facts relevant to the defendant's relative causal role. See Brief for United States 49. These factors need not be converted into a rigid formula, especially if doing so would result in trivial restitution orders. They should rather serve as rough guideposts for determining an amount that fits the offense . The resulting amount fixed by the court would be deemed the amount of the victim's general losses that were the "proximate result of th”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Bordman

2. “Title 18 U.S.C. § 2259 (a) provides that a district court 'shall order restitution for any offense' under Chapter 110 of Title 18, which covers a number of offenses involving the sexual exploitation of children and child pornography in particular.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Bordman

3. “a court must assess as best it can from available evidence the significance of the individual defendant's conduct in light of the broader causal process that produced the victim's losses.”

   1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
   e.g. United States v. Bordman