United States of America v. Christopher Lamont Stimpson, Jr

PRECEDENTIAL
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS
FOR THE THIRD CIRCUIT
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No. 22-3333
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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
v.
CHRISTOPHER LAMONT STIMPSON, JR.,
Appellant
__________
On Appeal from the United States District Court
for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania
(D.C. Crim. No. 5-20-cv-00413-001)
District Judge: Honorable Edward G. Smith
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Submitted Pursuant to Third Circuit LAR 34.1(a)
June 27, 2024
Before: KRAUSE, RESTREPO, and MATEY, Circuit Judges
(Filed: August 29, 2024)
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Michael N. Huff
1333 Race Street

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Philadelphia, PA 19107
Counsel for Appellant
Jacqueline C. Romero
Robert A. Zauzmer
Karen L. Grigsby
Mark S. Miller
U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE
615 Chestnut Street, Ste. 1250
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Counsel for Appellee
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OPINION OF THE COURT
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RESTREPO, Circuit Judge.
Our criminal legal system bears the heavy burden of
trying to right wrongs. Acknowledging that this process is
itself sometimes subject to error, a person’s right to appeal their
conviction and sentence is critical to ensuring outcomes that
are both correct as a matter of law and fair to the individual in
question. Christopher Lamont Stimpson, Jr., exercised this
right by asking us, pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3742(a), to review
the District Court’s validation of warrants to obtain evidence
never used against him at trial and its application of USSG
§2B3.1(b)(2)(D) at sentencing. While Mr. Stimpson is entitled
to raise these issues, they cannot provide him with the recourse
he seeks. We will affirm his conviction and sentence as
follows.

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I. The Frenchie Heist
This case begins in 2020 with an Amish family in
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The Stoltzfuses—Benuel,
Mary, and their 16-year-old daughter—bred and sold puppies
to supplement the income Mr. Stoltzfus earned at his
manufacturing job. In October 2020, with the help of a
manufacturing colleague’s computer and Internet access, Mr.
Stoltzfus listed five blue merle French bulldog puppies (“the
Frenchies”) for sale on Lancasterpuppies.com.
Mr. Stimpson—then 22 years old—reached Mr.
Stoltzfus by telephone to express interest in purchasing the
Frenchies for resale in North Carolina. The former shared
references with the latter and, after several telephone
conversations, the two agreed on a $23,500 cash price for the
five pups. They also agreed that Mr. Stimpson would pick Mr.
Stoltzfus up at his manufacturing job and take him home to
inspect the Frenchies before moving forward with the deal.
The sale day came and Mr. Stimpson, driven by his
associate Wilbert Artis, collected Mr. Stoltzfus at his job and
drove him home. After handling and photographing the
Frenchies, Mr. Stimpson agreed to the transaction and
instructed Mr. Artis to retrieve the cash from their vehicle. Mr.
Stoltzfus began counting the money at the family’s kitchen
table while Mr. Stimpson observed. The puppies (kept in a
white laundry basket), Mrs. Stoltzfus, and Mr. Artis,
meanwhile, remained in the family’s living room.
Things went awry when Mr. Artis then took the
Frenchies and their paperwork to the vehicle before the money

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count was complete. Mrs. Stoltzfus, concerned by this
development but fearful of raising the alarm in a language
comprehensible to Mr. Stimpson, went into the kitchen and
told her family what happened in Pennsylvania Dutch.1 Her
daughter responded, “Geh ruff die Leit,” or, “Go call the
people,” which her mother understood as an instruction to call
the police. Rather than doing so, Mrs. Stoltzfus remained
where she was. Suddenly, Mr. Stimpson grabbed the cash and
attempted to leave the house. Mr. Stoltzfus seized him and
knocked the money from his hands, scattering it all over the
kitchen floor. A struggle ensued that also involved Mrs.
Stoltzfus. Their daughter fled the home, ran up the hill to a shed
that contained the family’s telephone, and called the police.
To end the kitchen melee, Mr. Stimpson allegedly
pulled out a small black handgun, pointed it at Mr. Stoltzfus,
and ordered the couple to collect the fallen bills. While they
were doing so, Mr. Stimpson took the remaining uncounted
stacks of money from the kitchen table and fled the house. Mr.
Artis drove the two men, five Frenchies, their paperwork, and
most of the cash they came with back to North Carolina. The
Stoltzfuses, meanwhile, were left with $4,140 in cash and no
puppies.
After the robbery, Mr. Stoltzfus spoke with a man who
had also expressed interest in the Frenchies and asked him to
help track them down. The man—Donte Knox—found a public
1 The language, also known as Pennsylvania German,
exists in America thanks to a sizeable migration of German
speakers to the then-colony of Pennsylvania during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, it is spoken by
some 300,000 Americans.

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Instagram account called YoungBossStimp that appeared to
contain pictures of the stolen puppies. That Instagram account
linked to two others, EliteBodyFrenchies and
EliteBodyKennels, on which Mr. Knox saw photos and a video
of the Frenchies. He compiled the images, including a video
depicting the laundry basket-bound puppies in which Mr.
Stoltzfus could be heard speaking in the background. Mr. Knox
emailed those photos and that video to Mr. Stoltzfus’s
manufacturing colleague, who then forwarded them to
Sergeant Kenneth Lockhart at the Ephrata Police Department.
However, after learning that Mr. Knox had located these
images but before receiving the forwarded email, Sergeant
Lockhart scrolled Instagram for himself. He found the
EliteBodyFrenchies and EliteBodyKennels accounts, both
public at the time, and observed the video of the puppies at the
Stoltzfus home. He showed the video and photographs he
found to Mr. Stoltzfus, who used them to identify one of the
men as Mr. Stimpson. Law enforcement connected a few more
dots and ultimately arrested Mr. Stimpson in December 2020,
which led to a jury conviction for Hobbs Act robbery, 18
U.S.C. §§ 1951 and 2, and interstate transportation of stolen
goods, 18 U.S.C. §§ 2314 and 2, in March 2022. Mr. Stimpson
timely appealed, arguing that the District Court erred both by
not granting his suppression motion and by imposing the
§2B3.1(b)(2)(D) enhancement at sentencing.2
The Frenchies, meanwhile, were ultimately returned to
the Stoltzfuses unharmed and sold elsewhere.
2 The District Court had subject matter jurisdiction
pursuant to 18 U.S.C. § 3231. We have appellate jurisdiction
here under both 28 U.S.C. § 1291 and 18 U.S.C. § 3742.

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II. The Suppression Motion
Before trial, Mr. Stimpson filed a motion to suppress
evidence obtained from search warrants executed on four
Facebook and three Instagram accounts, arguing that the
warrants were overbroad and unsupported by probable cause.
The District Court held a hearing but later denied his request,
satisfied that the warrants met the Fourth Amendment’s
probable cause and particularity requirements. Then, prior to
trial, the government clarified that it would not use any photos
or videos obtained during the search of the social media
platforms. Rather, it would only seek admission of the Frenchie
content that had been posted on Mr. Stimpson’s publicly
available Instagram accounts, but which the government had
obtained legally and without warrants from two private citizens
(Mr. Knox and Mr. Stoltzfus’s manufacturing colleague) and
Sergeant Lockhart. At trial the government did just that, and a
jury ultimately convicted Mr. Stimpson without seeing any
evidence obtained by the warrants in question.
And yet, on appeal, Mr. Stimpson seeks to relitigate his
suppression motion. While he is certainly entitled to raise these
arguments, we need not indulge them with a substantive
response, as they ignore a glaringly dispositive concept:
mootness.3 Just as “there was no need [for the District Court]
to [address the merits of the suppression motion] because the
point had become moot once the [g]overnment agreed [before
trial] not to use any of the documents . . . at trial,” United States
3 We do not dismiss Mr. Stimpson’s appeal for lack of
jurisdiction and accordingly use “moot” colloquially, not in an
Article III sense.

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v. Lingala, 91 F.4th 685, 694 (3d Cir. 2024), so too is there no
need for us to review the District Court’s substantive decision
on suppression here. See also United States v. Trinh, 665 F.3d
1, 17 (1st Cir. 2011) (“The record clearly shows that no
evidence concerning the leaf fragment was in fact introduced
at trial, making any argument in favor of his motion to suppress
. . . now moot.”); United States v. Stearn, 597 F.3d 540, 544
n.3 (3d Cir. 2010) (mooting part of government’s appeal
because search warrant produced no evidence); United States
v. Arias-Villanueva, 998 F.2d 1491, 1502 (9th Cir. 1993)
(“[T]his issue is moot because the government did not
introduce any evidence seized during that search at trial.”)
rev’d on other grounds, 472 F.3d 1102 (9th Cir. 2007). Put
otherwise, we have nothing to exclude and therefore no remedy
to grant; what the warrants turned up the parties agree was
never admitted into evidence at trial. Therefore, we consider
Mr. Stimpson’s challenge moot.
III. The §2B3.1(b)(2)(D) Enhancement4
The parties also contested the application of an
enhancement under USSG §2B3.1(b)(2) at Mr. Stimpson’s
sentencing hearing. The District Court ultimately applied
§2B3.1(b)(2)(D), raising Mr. Stimpson’s offense level by four
points to 25 and producing an advisory Guidelines range of 70–
4 Under the advisory Sentencing Guidelines, district
courts make factual findings by a preponderance of the
evidence, and we review those findings for clear error. United
States v. Grier, 475 F.3d 556, 561 (3d Cir. 2007) (en banc). We
exercise plenary review over a district court’s interpretation of
the Guidelines. Id. at 570.

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87 months.5 Now on appeal, Mr. Stimpson challenges only the
sufficiency of the evidence, maintaining that the government
failed to prove by a preponderance that Mr. Stimpson
possessed a dangerous weapon. We cannot agree.
The preponderance of the evidence standard simply
asks: “Is it more likely that something happened than not?”
United States v. Santos, 932 F.2d 244, 248 (3d Cir. 1991); see
also id. at 252 (adopting definition). The Sentencing
Guidelines, meanwhile, instruct district courts to enhance the
base offense level for robbery by four levels “if a dangerous
weapon was otherwise used” during the crime.
§2B3.1(b)(2)(D). Read together, the District Court was
required to ask whether the evidence that Mr. Stimpson
“otherwise used” a “dangerous weapon” outweighed the
evidence against it. Id. We discern no clear error in its answer.
Mr. Stimpson maintains that the District Court erred in
its weighing of the evidence because there were numerous
inconsistencies between the victims’ testimony and their
reports to law enforcement, there were inconsistencies among
the reports themselves, and two of the victims made statements
5 The District Court placed Mr. Stimpson in Criminal
History Category III based on his four prior convictions for
marijuana possession. Notably, this sentencing pre-dated
Amendment 821 to the Guidelines, effective November 1,
2023, which specifies in the commentary to §4A1.3 that “[a]
downward departure . . . may be warranted . . . [if the
individual] received criminal history points from a sentence for
possession of marihuana for personal use, without an intent to
sell or distribute it to another person.” §4A1.3, comment.
(n.3(A)(ii)).

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evidencing racial bias. But Mr. and Mrs. Stoltzfus’s testimony
at trial—the most direct opportunity for the District Court to
weigh their credibility—was very similar and provided
considerable support for the enhancement’s application. Mr.
Stoltzfus shared that Mr. Stimpson “pulled a gun on [him],”
that it was “a small black handgun,” that he was “pointing it at
[him],” and that he was holding the gun “[k]ind of in the air in
his hand” and that it was pointed “[t]owards [him].” App’x
348–49. Mrs. Stoltzfus, meanwhile, testified that Mr. Stimpson
“pulled a gun” and “threatened” them, and described a
“[b]lack,” “small pistol type of a gun” that Mr. Stimpson
“aimed [] at [them]” while demanding that they pick up the
money. App’x 488. Of course, “the preponderance standard is
not toothless,” and it is indeed “the district court’s duty to
ensure that the [g]overnment carries this burden by presenting
reliable and specific evidence.” United States v. Roman, 121
F.3d 136, 141 (3d Cir. 1997) (quoting United States v.
Lawrence, 47 F.3d 1559, 1566 (11th Cir. 1995)). But on this
record, we cannot say with the certainty required on clear error
review that the District Court incorrectly weighed the evidence
in applying §2B3.1(b)(2)(D).
IV.
For the aforementioned reasons, we will affirm Mr.
Stimpson’s conviction and sentence.

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