Editor’s Note: Law Week Colorado edits court opinion summaries for style and, when necessary, length.
David Lesh is a content creator on social media and owner of an outdoor apparel brand. At the beginning of the pandemic, Lesh posted two Instagram photos of himself snowmobiling over a jump in a terrain park Keystone Resort, Colorado, at a time when the ski resort was closed.
The U.S. charged him with two crimes based on National Forest Service regulations: using an over-snow vehicle on NFS land off a designated route and conducting unauthorized work activity on NFS land. After a bench trial conducted by a magistrate judge, he was convicted of both counts.
Lesh challenged the sufficiency of the evidence to support his conviction and made various constitutional arguments.
According to the opinion, while Lesh was properly convicted of essentially trespassing under NFS regulations, his conviction for unauthorized work activity must be reversed. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals found the regulation doesn’t fairly warn social media users that posting images on the internet could constitute a federal crime. For that reason, the statute is impermissibly vague as applied to Lesh’s conduct, according to the opinion.
The 10th Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part.
In May 2018, Brian Estrada was a prisoner confined in the custody of the Colorado Department of Corrections. While attempting to escape a Colorado county courthouse, he was shot three times by Jacob Smart, a CDOC officer.
Estrada later sued Smart and alleged excessive force, but the district court granted Smart’s summary judgment motion. It concluded that Estrada had failed to exhaust all available CDOC administrative remedies by not following CDOC’s three-step grievance process.
Final judgment was entered, and Estrada timely appealed. Estrada argued that a county courthouse isn’t a CDOC prison, so his lawsuit isn’t “with respect to prison conditions” under the Prison Litigation Reform Act. He also claimed the CDOC grievance procedures apply only to CDOC prisons, so his claim is outside the scope of when and where they apply.
In this case, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals found that geography isn’t the controlling factor. Instead, as the district court correctly determined, the PLRA and CDOC’s grievance procedures both applied to the shooting of a CDOC inmate by a CDOC officer, according to the opinion.
The 10th Circuit affirmed.