PUBLISHED

UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS

FOR THE FOURTH CIRCUIT

No. 16-4615

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff – Appellee,

v.

CHARLES D. DOUGLAS, a/k/a Chris Davis,

Defendant - Appellant.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Virginia, at 

Charlottesville. Norman K. Moon, Senior District Judge. (3:16-cr-00017-NKM-1)

Argued: January 24, 2017 Decided: March 9, 2017 

Before NIEMEYER, TRAXLER, and DIAZ, Circuit Judges.

Affirmed by published opinion. Judge Traxler wrote the opinion, in which Judge 

Niemeyer and Judge Diaz joined.

ARGUED: Lisa M. Lorish, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC DEFENDER, 

Charlottesville, Virginia, for Appellant. Nancy Spodick Healey, OFFICE OF THE 

UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Charlottesville, Virginia, for Appellee. ON BRIEF: 

Larry W. Shelton, Federal Public Defender, OFFICE OF THE FEDERAL PUBLIC 

DEFENDER, Roanoke, Virginia, for Appellant. John P. Fishwick, Jr., United States 

Attorney, OFFICE OF THE UNITED STATES ATTORNEY, Roanoke, Virginia, for 

Appellee.
2

TRAXLER, Circuit Judge:

Defendant-Appellant Charles Douglas pled guilty to failure to register as a sex 

offender under the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (“SORNA”), in 

violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2250(a). He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, followed by 

five years of supervised release. On appeal, Douglas challenges the district court’s 

imposition as a special condition of supervised release that he undergo a sex-offender 

evaluation. For the reasons that follow, we affirm.

I.

Douglas was convicted in Virginia state court of aggravated sexual abuse in 

August 1994, arising out of the sexual abuse of his stepdaughter from January 1990 

through February 1992, when his victim was between 10 and 12 years old. Douglas was 

in his early thirties at the time. He was sentenced to ten years in prison, suspended to one

year, plus two years of supervised probation. Douglas participated in a sex-offender 

treatment program in 1995, while he was on state probation. As a result of this state 

conviction, Douglas was also required to register as a sex offender for life. Douglas was 

arrested for failure to register as a sex offender in Virginia in December 1999, but the 

charges were dropped in April 2000. He last registered as a sex offender in October 

2001, also in Virginia.

In 2002 and again in 2010, the Virginia State Police obtained arrest warrants for 

Douglas based on his failure to register as a sex offender. However, Douglas 

successfully evaded detection and arrest by assuming a false name and moving across 

state lines. He resided at various times in Washington, D.C., Kentucky, and Texas. In 
3

October 2015, the United States Marshals Service attempted to arrest Douglas in 

Kentucky when they became aware that he was residing there with an adult woman and 

using the alias “Chris Davis.” According to their interview of the woman, Douglas had 

no identification, no driver’s license, and no birth certificate during his time in Kentucky, 

and he avoided working for employers that required identification or paperwork. When 

Douglas learned that the Marshals had come to his home to arrest him, he fled to Texas, 

where he was finally located and arrested in February 2016. He was indicted in the 

Western District of Kentucky for failure to register as a sex offender in violation of 18 

U.S.C. § 2250(a), but consented to a transfer of his case to the Western District of 

Virginia, where he pled guilty without a plea agreement.

A presentence report (“PSR”) was prepared setting forth a guideline imprisonment 

range of 15-21 months for the SORNA conviction, plus a statutorily required term of 

supervised release of not less than five years. In addition to the standard conditions of 

supervised release not challenged here, the PSR recommended that the court impose 16 

special “Sex Offender Conditions” for supervised release provided for in Standing Order 

2013-04 of the Western District of Virginia. Douglas objected to the imposition of 13 of 

the 16 conditions, arguing that his SORNA violation was not a sex offense and that his 

prior conviction for aggravated sexual assault in 1994 was too remote in time to justify 

the conditions.

The government agreed that Douglas’s prior sex offense conviction was remote in 

time, but it argued that most of the sex-offender conditions were justified because “the 

remoteness of the defendant’s sex offense is directly related to his efforts to avoid 
4

apprehension” and “there is no way to know whether the defendant poses a recidivism 

risk.” J.A. 18. At a minimum, the government requested that the district court require 

Douglas to submit to a sex-offender evaluation for the purpose of evaluating his risk to 

the public and determining what, if any, other treatment or conditions were warranted to 

serve the goals of sentencing.

The district court agreed. Douglas was sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment, 

plus five years of supervised release, with the special condition that he “submit to an 

evaluation by a qualified mental health professional, approved by the probation officer, 

who is experienced in the treatment of sexual offenders” and “take all medications 

reasonably related to his condition, complete all treatment recommendations, and abide 

by all rules, requirements, and conditions imposed by the treatment provider until 

discharged from treatment by the provider.” J.A. 39. However, the district court 

declined to impose the remaining 12 sex-offender conditions recommended by the PSR

and objected to by Douglas, opting instead to add the proviso that the probation officer 

could “request modifications to the conditions of supervision as determined by the 

assessment of [the] qualified mental health professional.” J.A. 39.1

II.

 1

 The district court also imposed the three sex-offense conditions recommended 

by the PSR that Douglas did not challenge. Specifically, Douglas is required to comply 

with all federal, state, and local registration requirements; he is prohibited from 

possessing, viewing, or using any child pornography materials, or knowingly entering or 

remaining in any location where such materials are present; and he is required to obtain 

his probation officer’s approval of his residence and employment situation.
5

District courts are afforded “broad latitude to impose conditions on supervised 

release,” which we review for abuse of discretion only. United States v. Armel, 585 F.3d 

182, 186 (4th Cir. 2009). The court may impose any special condition that is “reasonably 

related” to the statutory sentencing factors referenced in 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d)(1), which 

include: (1) “the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and 

characteristics of the defendant,” 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a)(1); and (2) “the need for the 

sentence imposed . . . to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct,” 18 U.S.C. § 

3553(a)(2)(B), “to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant,” 18 U.S.C. § 

3553(a)(2)(C), and “to provide the defendant with needed educational or vocational 

training, medical care, or other correctional treatment in the most effective manner,” 18 

U.S.C. § 3553(a)(2)(D); see United States v. Dotson, 324 F.3d 256, 260 (4th Cir. 2003). 

When imposing such conditions, the sentencing court must also ensure that the condition 

“involves no greater deprivation of liberty than is reasonably necessary” to serve these 

sentencing goals, 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d)(2), and that it “is consistent with any pertinent 

policy statements issued by the Sentencing Commission,” 18 U.S.C. § 3583(d)(3); see 

Dotson, 324 F.3d at 260-61.

“Sex offender conditions of supervised release may be imposed, even at 

sentencing for crimes which are not sex crimes, if supported by § 3583(d).” United 

States v. Bear, 769 F.3d 1221, 1226 (10th Cir. 2014). The “particular restriction does not 

require an offense-specific nexus, but the sentencing court must adequately explain its 

decision and its reasons for imposing it.” United States v. Worley, 685 F.3d 404, 407 (4th 

Cir. 2012) (internal citation and quotation marks omitted). The “court must demonstrate 
6

that it considered the parties’ arguments and had a reasoned basis for exercising its own 

legal decisionmaking authority.” United States v. Lynn, 592 F.3d 572, 576 (4th Cir. 

2010) (internal quotation marks omitted). The “statement of reasons is important

because it helps the sentencing process evolve, allows for meaningful appellate review, 

and promotes the perception of fair sentencing.” Id. (internal citation, quotation marks 

and alterations omitted)).

A.

Douglas first contends that the district court committed procedural error by failing 

to adequately explain the basis for the condition requiring him to submit to a sex-offender 

evaluation. We disagree.

The district court record contains the information necessary for us to conduct a 

meaningful appellate review of the substantive reasonableness of the special condition. 

See id.; Armel, 585 F.3d at 186. At the sentencing hearing, the district court explicitly 

considered the remoteness of Douglas’s prior sex offense, mindful that it should not 

“dwell” solely on the prior sex offense when evaluating whether the sex-offense 

conditions of supervised release were warranted. J.A. 49. However, the district court 

also shared the government’s concern about the 14-plus years of evasive actions that 

Douglas took to avoid apprehension by law enforcement after he failed to register as a 

sex offender. The district court then stated that it had “considered the factors noted in 18 

U.S.C. [§]3553(a): the defendant’s history, characteristics, and the nature and 

circumstances of the offense, as well as the defendant’s prior sex conviction,” and 

proceeded to address the sex offender-conditions recommended in the PSR. J.A. 60. In 
7

doing so, the district court explained that “the remoteness of [Douglas’s] conviction[] is 

such that the Court should not assume that all of these [recommended] conditions, after 

an assessment, be complied with,” and further noted that “otherwise, I think we would be 

going into punishing the defendant for the original offense rather than what he is here for 

today.” J.A. 62 (emphasis added). Having reviewed all of the relevant considerations, 

the district court decided to only impose the limited condition that Douglas submit to a 

sex-offender evaluation, explaining that “[t]he probation officer will [then] know what 

the provider determined,” J.A. 61-62, and “can look [for] guidance from the sex offender 

conditions” for further appropriate conditions. J.A. 62 (emphasis added). Accordingly, 

we are satisfied that the district court adequately considered the parties’ arguments and 

that the district court’s explanation, while brief, was sufficient to allow meaningful 

appellate review of the substantive reasonableness of the challenged condition.

B.

Douglas next contends that the district court abused its discretion in imposing the

limited condition that he submit to a sex-offender evaluation, arguing that it is not 

reasonably related to the sentencing factors set forth in §§ 3553(a)(1), (a)(2)(B), 

(a)(2)(C), and (a)(2)(D), and that it involves a greater deprivation of liberty than 

reasonably necessary in violation of § 3583(d)(2). Specifically, Douglas argues that his 

1994 sex-offense conviction is too remote, standing alone, to justify the need for a sexoffender evaluation. As further support, Douglas points out that he completed a sexabuse treatment program in 1995 (during his two years of supervised probation for his 

prior sex offense), and that his criminal record has been clean since then (with the 
8

exception of the 1999 arrest for failure to register and a 2002 arrest for driving while 

suspended). 

As the district court recognized, “[p]rior sex offenses can be too temporally 

remote for sex-offender conditions of supervised release to be reasonably related to the 

nature and circumstances of the offense, the defendant’s history and characteristics, the 

deterrence of criminal conduct, the protection of the public from further crimes of the 

defendant, or the defendant’s educational, vocational, medical or other correctional 

needs.” Bear, 769 F.3d at 1227. For example, we have held that a 12-year-old sex 

offense conviction, committed when the defendant was 21 years old, could not, “standing 

alone,” justify special sex-offender conditions. Worley, 685 F.3d at 409. However, 

“[t]here is no bright-line rule for the outer limit of temporal remoteness, in part because 

district courts must consider more than just the age of a defendant’s prior conviction.”

Bear, 769 F.3d at 1227. That is precisely what the district court properly did in this case.

While Douglas is correct that his SORNA violation is not a "sex offense" for 

purposes of imposing a term of supervised release under the Guidelines, see U.S.S.G. § 

5D1.2, cmt. n.1, a SORNA violation is not wholly unrelated to the prior sex offense. 

Indeed, the very purpose of SORNA is to “protect the community from the risks posed by 

convicted sex offenders by requiring registration and then by providing notification” to 

the public. United States v. Morales-Cruz, 712 F.3d 71, 75 (1st Cir. 2013); United States 

v. Under Seal, 709 F.3d 257, 260 (4th Cir. 2013) (SORNA “was enacted ‘to protect the 

public from sex offenders and offenders against children, and in response to the vicious 

attacks by violent predators,’” [by] “‘establish[ing] a comprehensive national system for 
9

the registration of those offenders.’”) (quoting 42 U.S.C. § 16901); see also Smith v. Doe, 

538 U.S. 84, 99 (2003) (noting with respect to analogous requirements under Alaska law, 

that “[t]he purpose and the principal effect of notification are to inform the public for its 

own safety, not to humiliate the offender”). SORNA “‘ma[d]e more uniform what had 

remained a patchwork of federal and 50 individual state registration systems, with 

loopholes and deficiencies that had resulted in an estimated 100,000 sex offenders 

becoming missing or lost.” Nichols v. United States, 136 S. Ct. 1113, 1119 (2016)

(internal quotation marks omitted). The “[r]egistration requirements [that] SORNA 

imposes are justified by the high recidivism rate for offenders.” Morales-Cruz, 712 F.3d 

at 75; Smith, 538 U.S. at 105 (“[R]ecidivism is the statutory concern”).

Here, the district court plainly did not ground the challenged condition that 

Douglas submit to a sex-offender evaluation solely upon Douglas’s 1994 conviction. 

Rather, there are a number of other circumstances that weighed into and justified the 

district court’s decision to impose the limited condition that Douglas submit to the 

evaluation as a first step to determining what, if any, additional treatment and conditions 

were warranted.

Douglas’s prior sex offense involved the sexual assault of a prepubescent minor on 

multiple occasions over a two-year period -- when Douglas was in his thirties and the 

child was between 10 and 12 years old. Although he completed a sex-offender treatment 

program in 1995, while he was on state probation, Douglas ceased complying with his 

registration requirements in 2001, within five years of completing his state probation 
10

term. He then took affirmative steps, including changing his name and moving regularly, 

to elude detection and arrest for over 14 years.

Consequently, Douglas did not merely fail to register under SORNA years after he 

had completed his sentence and treatment for his prior sex offense, and Douglas was not 

arrested within a short time after he violated his registration requirements. Instead, he 

“made a conscious choice to defeat th[e] purposes” of the sex-offender registration laws 

in several different jurisdictions for well over a decade. Morales-Cruz, 712 F.3d at 75. 

“These continuing failures certainly permit a rational inference that [Douglas] presented a 

recidivism risk and warranted deterrent punishment. His conduct undermined the efforts 

made by Congress in SORNA, and by the states in their statutes, to combat the risks of 

recidivism.” Id.; see also Bear, 769 F.3d at 1228 (noting that defendant’s “intervening 

sex offender registration conviction and current SORNA conviction, while fundamentally 

different than the underlying sex offenses, are not entirely unrelated and raise concerns 

that [defendant] may not comply with his ongoing SORNA obligations,” justifying 

“special conditions related to rehabilitation and monitoring”); cf. United States v. 

Springston, 650 F.3d 1153, 1157 (8th Cir. 2011) (noting that special conditions requiring 

sex-offender treatment might “be justified in a case involving failure to register as a sex 

offender” for a remote prior conviction, “such as when there is reason to believe that the 

failure to register evidences recalcitrance and an ongoing proclivity to commit sexual 

crimes”), vacated on other grounds, 132 S. Ct. 1905 (2012).

We are also not persuaded by Douglas’s argument that the condition was not 

justified because his criminal record has been clean since his prior offense (with the 
11

exception of the 1999 arrest for failure to register and a 2002 arrest for driving while 

suspended), and that he only took steps to evade arrest during the ensuing 14 years to 

avoid paying $70,000 in child support, and not to victimize children in secret. Although 

there is nothing in the record to indicate that Douglas engaged in sexual offenses or 

inappropriate sexual behavior during the time that he was on the run, his arguments 

cannot be divorced from the fact that he was, in fact, on the run. He was taking 

affirmative steps to conceal his activities from law enforcement and simultaneously (and 

knowingly) violating state and federal registration laws, the very purpose of which are to 

alert the public to the presence of a convicted sex offender so as to deter sexually deviant

and recidivist behavior and to prevent, particularly in the case of child sex offenders, 

offenses that often take place in secret. Cf. Morales-Cruz, 712 F.3d at 75 (holding that in 

light of defendant’s “manifest lack of respect for the SORNA registration requirements, 

and the reasonable inference that his refusal to comply with these requirements poses a 

risk of recidivism, the district court’s imposition of sex-offender treatment was 

reasonably related to [defendant’s] present offense as well as to his criminal history”). 

Accordingly, we hold that the district court acted well within its broad discretion 

to impose the condition that Douglas submit to a sex-offender evaluation. The condition 

is reasonably related to the nature and circumstances of the offense and the history and 

characteristics of the defendant, including his prior sex offense and the extraordinary 

steps he took to avoid registration and apprehension by law enforcement for many years. 

The condition is also reasonably related to the need to protect the public from further 

crimes of the defendant, to provide the defendant with needed treatment in the most 
12

effective manner, and to afford adequate deterrence to criminal conduct in the future. 

Moreover, the district court’s approach of imposing the single condition that Douglas 

submit to a sex-offender evaluation, and declining to impose additional conditions unless 

the evaluation were to indicate that they are warranted, reflects the district court’s 

measured judgment to impose conditions causing no greater a deprivation of liberty than 

was reasonably necessary to satisfy those factors.

2

III.

For the foregoing reasons, we hold that the sentence imposed by the district court 

is procedurally and substantively reasonable, and we affirm the judgment of the district 

court. 

AFFIRMED

 2 On appeal, Douglas complains about the invasiveness of a sex-offender 

evaluation, specifically its use of polygraphs and penile plethysmography testing. 

Although Douglas did not specifically raise this claim during the sentencing hearing, he 

did object collectively to the sex-offender evaluation condition and the separate condition 

that he submit to polygraph and plethysmograph examinations in his sentencing 

memorandum. The district court only imposed the former condition (the sex-offender 

evaluation), and it declined to impose the latter condition (pertaining to polygraphs and 

plethysmographs) pending the results of the evaluation. In any event, we have held that 

polygraphs and the plethysmograph test are “useful for treatment of sex offenders,” and 

we have upheld the use of these tools as a condition of release. See United States v. 

Dotson, 324 F.3d 256, 260 (4th Cir. 2003) (internal quotation marks omitted). 

Accordingly, even assuming that the qualified mental health provider would include these 

examinations as a part of the initial sex-offender evaluation, it would not change our 

analysis of the reasonableness of the district court’s exercise of its discretion to impose 

the condition in light of all of the circumstances and the goals of sentencing.