Background
Steven Randall Neal pleaded guilty without a plea agreement to attempting, through Facebook Messenger, to persuade, induce, entice, or coerce a minor to engage in unlawful sexual activity, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 2422(b). The indictment alleged a continuing enticement offense from August 2021 through August 2023 involving a girl who was 12 when Neal began communicating with her.
During that period, Neal twice sexually assaulted the victim: first in July 2022, when he used force and digitally penetrated her, and again in August 2023, when he followed her into a bathroom and groped her. The district court treated the assaults as relevant conduct, applied the cross-reference from U.S.S.G. § 2G1.3 to the sexual-abuse guideline in § 2A3.1, imposed enhancements for a forced sexual act and a pattern of prohibited sexual conduct, and calculated a range of 292 to 365 months. It sentenced Neal to 292 months.
The Court’s Holding
The Sixth Circuit affirmed. Assuming, as the parties did, that § 2422(b) permitted the government to charge Neal’s conduct as a single continuing offense over the two-year period, the court held that both assaults occurred “during the commission of” that offense under U.S.S.G. § 1B1.3(a)(1). The assaults took place within the charged period, involved the same victim, and were logically connected to Neal’s ongoing effort to entice her. The court expressly did not resolve whether § 2422(b) is properly treated as a continuing offense in these circumstances.
The court also upheld the four-level enhancement for conduct described in 18 U.S.C. § 2241(a), rejecting Neal’s double-counting argument because the cross-reference addressed sexual abuse while the enhancement addressed its aggravated, forcible nature. It upheld the five-level pattern enhancement because Neal abused the same child on two separate occasions more than a year apart and in different locations. Finally, the court held that the bottom-of-guidelines sentence was substantively reasonable because the district court reasonably balanced the seriousness and duration of the conduct against Neal’s limited criminal history and family relationships.
Key Takeaways
- Criminal conduct occurring within the charged duration of a continuing offense may qualify as relevant conduct when it also bears a logical relationship to the offense.
- Applying both § 2G1.3’s cross-reference to § 2A3.1 and § 2A3.1’s forced-sexual-act enhancement was not impermissible double counting because the provisions addressed distinct aspects of the conduct.
- Sexual assaults against the same child more than a year apart and in different locations constituted separate occasions supporting the pattern-of-activity enhancement.
Why It Matters
The decision illustrates how the timeframe admitted through a guilty plea can substantially affect a defendant’s guidelines calculation. When an enticement charge is treated as a continuing offense, related assaults occurring within that period may trigger a more severe guideline and multiple enhancements even though the defendant was not separately convicted of those assaults.
The holding is expressly limited by the panel’s unexamined assumption that the indictment properly charged a single continuing § 2422(b) offense. The court flagged, but left unresolved, whether the statute permits that treatment when alleged enticement leads to discrete sexual acts.