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United States of America v. Jeffrey Shields

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Before Lynch, Chief Judge, Lipez, Circuit Judge, and Woodcock, *fn1 District Judge.

LIPEZ, Circuit Judge. Jeffrey Shields was convicted in 2002 by a federal court for possession of child pornography. In 2006, a day before his scheduled release from custody, the Bureau of Prisons filed a petition in the District Court for the District of Massachusetts to have Shields civilly committed as a “sexually dangerous person” under the authority of 18 U.S.C. § 4248. After a ten-day bench trial with an advisory jury, during which the court heard evidence of Shields’s history of child molestation as well as opinions from several clinical psychologists on the risk that Shields would commit future offenses, the court found that the government had met its burden of proving Shields to be “sexually dangerous” and ordered him committed.

In this appeal, Shields raises two primary challenges to his civil commitment. First, he argues that he was not lawfully in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons at the time the commitment proceedings were initiated, and accordingly that the Bureau’s petition should have been dismissed. Second, Shields argues that the district court erred in concluding that the government met its burden of proving his sexual dangerousness by “clear and convincing evidence.” In addition, Shields pursues a number of challenges to the constitutionality of the commitment scheme, all of which are foreclosed by precedent or have been waived. After a careful review of the record, we find no error in the district court’s factfinding and legal analysis, and therefore we affirm.

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