A federal appeals court threw out a 14-year prison sentence and ordered a new trial in a child pornography case because a judge didn’t remove a juror who couldn’t vow to give the defendant a fair trial.
On Tuesday in United States v. Shepard, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit vacated Trent Shepard’s December 2011 sentence and ordered a new trial. Shepard was convicted before U.S. District Judge David Dowd Jr. of three counts of receiving visual depictions of minors engaged in sexually explicit conduct.
