The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit rejected a defendant’s claims that a judge in Massachusetts improperly relied on “personal observations about his own, private gun collection” during a probation violation hearing when determining that at least one weapon shown in a video was a real firearm.
The defendant, Adilson Teixeira, had been sentenced in 2016 to just over three years in prison for federal drug-trafficking and firearms charges followed by a three-year term of supervised release, which initially came with a series of violations for associating with persons involved with criminal activity, using a controlled substance, and operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license, according to the appellate court’s opinion filed March 10.
