Ronald Norweathers v. United States of America

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 23-2406
R ONALD NORWEATHERS ,
Petitioner-Appellant,
v.
U NITED S TATES OF A MERICA,
Respondent-Appellee.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 21 C 3040 — Joan H. Lefkow, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED J ANUARY 28, 2025 — DECIDED A PRIL 3, 2025
____________________
Before HAMILTON , K IRSCH , and M ALDONADO, Circuit
Judges.
K IRSCH , Circuit Judge. Ronald Norweathers was convicted
by a jury and sentenced to 250 months’ imprisonment for pos-
sessing and distributing child pornography. At trial, he at-
tempted a last-ditch public authority defense: he testified that
he believed he was acting at the behest of an FBI agent who
misled him into collecting and forwarding child pornography
as part of a nonexistent undercover operation. The jury

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rejected his rather fantastic tale, and his post-trial motions and
direct appeal were unsuccessful.
Norweathers then moved to vacate his conviction and sen-
tence under 28 U.S.C. § 2255 on various grounds. Among
them, he claimed his trial counsel was ineffective for failing to
request an apparent authority or entrapment by estoppel jury
instruction and for not calling as a witness the computer fo-
rensics expert that counsel had retained and consulted. The
district court denied his motion without a hearing. On appeal,
Norweathers renews his ineffective assistance of counsel
claims and says the district court abused its discretion by
denying his motion without a hearing. Neither argument has
merit, so we affirm.
I
A
In September 2009, undercover FBI agents identified an in-
dividual trading and sharing child pornography. The subse-
quent investigation led to the execution of a search warrant at
a business called 1-800-Radiator. There, agents found child
pornography on the desktop and personal laptop of an em-
ployee named Ronald Norweathers. Norweathers was on su-
pervised release for bank robbery and was a registered sex of-
fender, previously convicted of indecent solicitation of a mi-
nor. During his initial FBI interview, Norweathers waived his
Miranda rights and admitted to regularly viewing and trading
child pornography, though he later said those statements
were involuntary.
Agents obtained access to Norweathers’s various online
accounts (at first with permission and then later through a
search warrant after Norweathers revoked consent). Agents

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No. 23-2406 3
searched his personal email address and found two emails
with attached images of child pornography that Norweathers
had sent to other individuals. On August 4, 2009, Norweath-
ers emailed another account four images, several of which de-
picted toddlers being sexually abused by adults.
On March 13, 2009, Norweathers sent an email to a second
account, nomoreravens@aol.com, and attached a zip file con-
taining 78 images. Almost all were child pornography, includ-
ing graphic images of toddlers and prepubescent children en-
gaged in sexually explicit activity. Nomoreravens replied to
the email, “What did you send me?” and Norweathers an-
swered, “A zip. Why? You like or no?” Nomoreravens re-
sponded, “I don’t want kiddie porn, scary.” Norweathers re-
plied, “Well duh, pick through for the teen stuff. I sent how it
came to me.”
Norweathers was indicted on six counts of transportation
of child pornography. Several charges relied on evidence
from Norweathers’s personal laptop and were dismissed be-
cause the laptop had been stolen from an agent’s car after it
was seized. The government then brought a superseding in-
dictment charging Norweathers with three counts of trans-
portation of child pornography (Counts 1, 2, and 3) and one
count of possession (Count 4). The August 4 and March 13
emails formed the basis for Counts 2 and 3, respectively. The
possession charge related to images found on Norweathers’s
hard drive during the subsequent search. The government
eventually dismissed Count 1, and Counts 2 through 4 pro-
ceeded to trial.
Consistent with his pretrial motions, Norweathers’s pri-
mary defense at trial disputed his identity as the individual
who sent the emails in question. In response, the government

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introduced an email exchange establishing Norweathers’s
identity, motive, and knowledge. In that conversation, Nor-
weathers and another individual discussed in detail their de-
sire to drug and rape children as young as four years old.
After the government rested its case-in-chief, Norweathers
testified in his own defense. Just before, he informed his coun-
sel for the first time, who in turn notified the court, that he
intended to present a public authority defense. On the stand,
Norweathers abandoned his identity defense wholesale and
admitted to sending the March 13 and August 4 emails. In-
stead, he testified that he believed he was assisting an FBI
agent named Joseph Bonsuk with an undercover investiga-
tion into child pornography distribution when he sent the
emails.
Bonsuk was the owner of the nomoreravens@aol.com ac-
count and the other party to the March 13 email exchange.
Norweathers said that he formed a relationship with Bonsuk
in late 2008, supposedly to help root out distributors of child
pornography. Norweathers testified that he had contacted his
probation officer asking to be an informant because he noticed
he had become a “magnet” for individuals interested in child
pornography. On the stand, he claimed that child pornogra-
phy disgusted him, but he was impeached on this point by a
previous statement discussing his interest in it and his attrac-
tion to underage boys (as well as his conviction for attempting
to have sex with a 14-year-old).
Norweathers admitted that his probation officer explicitly
informed him that he could not serve as a government inform-
ant while on federal supervision. Nevertheless, Norweathers
said he “went actively searching online to see if there was
somebody [he] could either meet or maybe just give

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No. 23-2406 5
anonymous tips.” He testified that he met Bonsuk online, pos-
sibly in a chatroom, though he was unsure. Bonsuk purport-
edly told Norweathers he worked for the FBI and sent him a
PDF on FBI letterhead verifying his employment. Norweath-
ers said Bonsuk instructed him to speak with individuals who
were harming children or sharing child pornography and to
send Bonsuk everything on a weekly basis to facilitate his in-
vestigation. Norweathers claimed his stolen laptop contained
the PDF and these exculpatory conversations with Bonsuk.
In reality, Bonsuk was not an FBI agent, but a clerical em-
ployee who was not authorized to handle confidential inform-
ants. When questioned about the plausibility of his claims,
Norweathers admitted that he had never met Bonsuk in per-
son or spoken with him by telephone. He acknowledged that
Bonsuk’s nomoreravens@aol.com account did not look like an
official FBI email address. He testified that he had never spo-
ken with Bonsuk through an official FBI email address and
that they often communicated through instant message.
Norweathers further admitted that Bonsuk never told him
specifically to send or receive child pornography images. In-
stead, Norweathers testified that it was implied he could send
and receive child pornography if needed to gain access to
other people as part of his investigation. When questioned
about the conversation where Bonsuk said he did not want
“kiddie porn, scary” and Norweathers instructed him to “pick
through for the teen stuff,” Norweathers explained that Bon-
suk was investigating an individual interested in a “teenage
variation” of child pornography. As far as the August 4 email
and child pornography shared from a screen name belonging
to him, Norweathers maintained that each was also to aid
Bonsuk’s investigation. He further testified that the child

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6 No. 23-2406
pornography on his work computer was stored only in tem-
porary cache files, consistent with someone forwarding them
through a photo-sharing program without saving them to the
computer.
Unsurprisingly, government witnesses from the FBI testi-
fied that Norweathers was never a cooperating source. They
also confirmed that FBI agents and their confidential inform-
ants are not allowed to distribute child pornography. The
government’s evidence further suggested that Norweathers
first learned about Bonsuk’s connection to the FBI during dis-
covery. As for Bonsuk’s fate, the FBI conducted an internal in-
vestigation, discovered no connection between him and Nor-
weathers, and declined to impose disciplinary action.
Despite the mounting evidence undermining his claims,
Norweathers maintained that he had been “horribly misled”
by Bonsuk into distributing child pornography. The parties
agreed on the Seventh Circuit’s pattern jury instruction on the
public authority defense. At the end of trial, the jury was in-
structed:
The defendant contends that he acted in re-
liance on public authority. A defendant who
commits an offense in reliance on public author-
ity does not act knowingly and should be found
not guilty. To be found not guilty based on reli-
ance on public authority, the defendant must
prove that each of the following three things are
more likely true than not true.
First, an agent of the United States Govern-
ment directed the defendant to engage in the

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No. 23-2406 7
conduct charged against the defendant in
Counts Two, Three, and Four;
This agent had the actual authority to grant
authorization for the defendant to engage in this
conduct; and
Three, in engaging in this conduct, the de-
fendant reasonably relied on the agent’s author-
ization.
In deciding this, you should consider all of
the relevant circumstances, including the iden-
tity of the government official, what the official
said to the defendant, and how closely the de-
fendant followed any instructions the official
gave.
The jury found Norweathers guilty on all counts. The dis-
trict court denied Norweathers’s post-trial motions for an ac-
quittal or a new trial in the alternative and sentenced him to
250 months’ imprisonment with lifetime supervised release.
We affirmed his conviction on direct appeal. United States v.
Norweathers, 895 F.3d 485, 492 (7th Cir. 2018).
B
Norweathers then moved to have his sentence and convic-
tion vacated under 28 U.S.C. § 2255. His pro se motion raised
approximately 15 grounds of collateral attack. Two are rele-
vant here. First, Norweathers claimed his trial counsel was in-
effective for failing to request a public authority jury instruc-
tion allowing the government official to have only apparent
authority or, alternatively, for failing to request an instruction
on entrapment by estoppel. He said the pattern instruction
prejudiced him because it required the official to have actual

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8 No. 23-2406
authority, an insurmountable hurdle in his case given Bon-
suk’s position in the FBI.
Second, Norweathers said he received deficient represen-
tation because his counsel insufficiently consulted with and
failed to call at trial a computer forensics expert retained for
his defense. He complained that he was only allowed to meet
with the expert once while all other communication with the
expert was through counsel. According to Norweathers,
counsel did not comprehend the technological issues and ev-
idence in this case and therefore failed to appreciate the im-
portance of the expert’s testimony. Without it, Norweathers
said his defense could not meaningfully rebut the govern-
ment’s evidence. His motion did not include any specific in-
formation about the expert’s conclusions or proffered testi-
mony. Instead, Norweathers discussed his own review of the
evidence and personal conclusion that his computer had been
tampered with and exculpatory evidence deleted.
The district court denied the § 2255 motion without hold-
ing an evidentiary hearing. It said that whether Norweathers
received an apparent authority or entrapment by estoppel in-
struction was immaterial because his testimony failed to es-
tablish that his reliance on a government agent’s authority
was reasonable. Still, it granted a certificate of appealability
on the issue. The court did not directly address the computer
forensics expert argument, summarily dismissing it along
with others that it deemed rambling, unfocused, not suffi-
ciently cogent to suggest constitutional error, or otherwise not
germane to a § 2255 motion. After Norweathers timely ap-
pealed, we expanded the certificate of appealability to include
the additional claim that trial counsel was ineffective for fail-
ing to call the expert as a witness at trial.

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No. 23-2406 9
II
Ineffective assistance of counsel claims may be brought in
collateral proceedings under § 2255. Massaro v. United States,
538 U.S. 500, 509 (2003). To successfully challenge his convic-
tion this way, Norweathers must establish that his legal rep-
resentation was objectively deficient and he was prejudiced
by this performance. Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668, 687
(1984). Our review of counsel’s representation is “most defer-
ential.” Harrington v. Richter, 562 U.S. 86, 105 (2011). We “ap-
ply a strong presumption” that it “was within the wide range
of reasonable professional assistance.” Id. at 104 (quotation
omitted). This helps avoid the temptation to “second-guess
counsel’s assistance” after an unfavorable outcome. Strick-
land, 466 U.S. at 689. As for prejudice, Norweathers must
demonstrate “a reasonable probability that, but for counsel’s
unprofessional errors, the result of the proceedings would
have been different.” Id. at 694. This requires a “substantial,
not just conceivable, likelihood of a different result.” Cullen v.
Pinholster, 563 U.S. 170, 189 (2011) (quotation omitted).
A
Norweathers first maintains that his counsel was ineffec-
tive for failing to request a jury instruction on apparent au-
thority or entrapment by estoppel. Counsel may provide de-
ficient representation by failing to object to a defective jury
instruction. Harden v. United States, 986 F.3d 701, 705 (7th Cir.
2021). But mere agreement to an improper instruction is not
enough: Norweathers must show that agreement prejudiced
him in a way that “undermine[s] confidence in the verdict.”
Id. at 707.

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10 No. 23-2406
At trial, Norweathers’s attorney agreed to the pattern in-
struction on public authority. This required Norweathers to
prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Bonsuk had
actual authority to instruct him to distribute and possess child
pornography. Of course, the evidence presented at trial made
clear that Bonsuk lacked the authority to do this. Norweathers
therefore argues that his trial counsel should have known to
ask for an entrapment by estoppel instruction or a public au-
thority instruction allowing acquittal based on Bonsuk’s ap-
parent authority.
The defenses of public authority and entrapment by estop-
pel are similar but have certain conceptual differences. United
States v. Stallworth, 656 F.3d 721, 726 (7th Cir. 2011). The public
authority defense is available to a defendant who engages in
activity he “knows to be otherwise illegal but that has been
authorized by the government.” Id. at 726–27. The entrapment
by estoppel defense applies when a government official leads
a defendant to believe his conduct is legal. Id. at 727. In en-
trapment by estoppel cases, the government official may have
actual or apparent authority to make those assurances. Id. By
contrast, most circuits limit the public authority defense to sit-
uations in which the government official had actual, not
merely apparent, authority to authorize the defendant’s con-
duct.*
* United States v. Holmquist, 36 F.3d 154, 161 n.7 (1st Cir. 1994); United
States v. Giffen, 473 F.3d 30, 39 (2d Cir. 2006); United States v. Pitt, 193 F.3d
751, 757–58 (3d Cir. 1999); United States v. Fulcher, 250 F.3d 244, 253–54 (4th
Cir. 2001); United States v. Hale, 685 F.3d 522, 542 (5th Cir. 2012); United
States v. Theunick, 651 F.3d 578, 589 (6th Cir. 2011); United States v. Burrows,
36 F.3d 875, 881–82 (9th Cir. 1994) (following United States v. Baptista-Ro-
driguez, 17 F.3d 1354, 1368 n.1 (11th Cir. 1994)); United States v. Alvarado,
808 F.3d 474, 484 (11th Cir. 2015). The Eighth and Tenth Circuits are

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No. 23-2406 11
We have not decided this issue and decline to once again,
because the similarities between the defenses guide our deci-
sion today. Both require “that a government official affirma-
tively communicate to the defendant that he is authorized to
engage in certain conduct without incurring criminal liabil-
ity.” Id. at 726. And under either, the defendant must actually
and reasonably rely on the government agent’s authority
(whether it be actual or apparent). United States v. Baker, 438
F.3d 749, 755 (7th Cir. 2006) (entrapment by estoppel); United
States v. Strahan, 565 F.3d 1047, 1051 (7th Cir. 2009) (public au-
thority). These are rare defenses, Baker, 438 F.3d at 753, and
Norweathers is not the exceptional defendant who may avail
himself of them.
First, Norweathers admitted at trial that Bonsuk never af-
firmatively instructed him to send or receive child pornogra-
phy. This hobbles his argument straight out the gate, since
both defenses require an affirmative communication by the
government official sanctioning the conduct in question. Stall-
worth, 656 F.3d at 726. Genuine or not, Norweathers’s belief
that authorization was implied from the context of the so-
called investigation does not suffice.
Second, supposing we suspend disbelief and credit Nor-
weathers’s story as true, his testimony belies any reasonable
reliance on Bonsuk’s representations. Norweathers himself
sought Bonsuk out, met him online, and communicated with
him solely via email and instant messaging. They never met
in person or spoke on the phone. His email was nomorera-
vens@aol.com, which Norweathers admitted did not look like
undecided. United States v. Xiong, 914 F.3d 1154, 1160 (8th Cir. 2019);
United States v. Granado, 501 F. App’x 820, 824 (10th Cir. 2012).

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12 No. 23-2406
an official FBI account. Norweathers alleges to have the tech-
nological skills necessary to conduct in-depth forensics re-
views of the evidence and make complex technical argu-
ments—presumably he would know that anyone with a com-
puter and word processing program could fabricate a docu-
ment with FBI letterhead. And it goes without saying that his
exchange with Bonsuk regarding “kiddie porn” was far from
the kind of professional communication one would expect
with a government official.
Further, Norweathers had been told he was ineligible to
serve as a confidential source. He colors this as a mere tech-
nical violation of the terms of his supervised release. But the
question remains: Why would it be reasonable for Norweath-
ers to believe that he, as a convicted sex offender on super-
vised release, would be the FBI’s legitimate choice for a confi-
dential informant to expose child pornography distributors?
Ultimately, even if Norweathers “somehow truly believed”
that he was indeed a confidential informant, “this is unavail-
ing, for reasonableness in this context is objective.” United
States v. Neville, 82 F.3d 750, 762 (7th Cir. 1996).
Norweathers’s own testimony reveals his inability to pre-
vail under an entrapment by estoppel defense or an apparent
authority instruction. It is therefore immaterial whether the
jury received these instructions, and the district court
properly denied this claim.
B
We now turn to Norweathers’s claim that he received in-
effective assistance because counsel did not call the computer
forensics expert at trial. He says the district court abused its
discretion by rejecting his § 2255 motion without holding an

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No. 23-2406 13
evidentiary hearing on this issue. Norweathers is entitled to a
hearing if his § 2255 motion “alleges facts that, if proven,
would entitle him to relief.” Stoia v. United States, 22 F.3d 766,
768 (7th Cir. 1994). But not every claim warrants one; district
courts have “discretion to proceed to decision on a § 2255 mo-
tion without holding an evidentiary hearing.” Williams v.
United States, 879 F.3d 244, 248 (7th Cir. 2018). None is needed
for allegations that are “vague, conclusory, or palpably in-
credible, rather than detailed and specific.” Martin v. United
States, 789 F.3d 703, 706 (7th Cir. 2015) (quotation omitted).
Norweathers’s motion did not allege detailed and specific
facts entitling him to an evidentiary hearing. To be sure, it dis-
cussed various technical issues and included sporadic criti-
cisms about how the government handled and preserved ev-
idence. But the vast majority of these allegations were based
on his review of the evidence and what he would testify to at
a hearing. He made only two specific allegations regarding
the expert, and neither is compelling. First, Norweathers com-
plained that he only met with the expert once. Second, Nor-
weathers said the lack of the expert’s testimony at trial made
it difficult to meaningfully cross-examine the government’s
witnesses and rebut its evidence.
This was not a situation where counsel failed to consult an
expert needed for the defense, Anderson v. United States, 981
F.3d 565, 573–74 (7th Cir. 2020), insufficiently investigated a
potentially exculpatory issue, Dunn v. Jess, 981 F.3d 582, 592
(7th Cir. 2020), or knowingly used an unqualified expert, Hin-
ton v. Alabama, 571 U.S. 263, 275 (2014). Rather, counsel lob-
bied the court to retain and fund a computer forensics expert
to investigate important technical issues and consulted with
that expert. “[G]iven the evidence that counsel did consult an

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14 No. 23-2406
expert, the decision not to call that expert ‘is a paradigmatic
example of the type of strategic choice that, when made after
thorough investigation of the law and facts, is virtually un-
challengeable.’” Harden, 986 F.3d at 707 (quoting Hinton, 571
U.S. at 275). The decision not to have this expert testify enjoys
the presumption of a sound trial strategy, and Norweathers
supplies no detailed and specific allegations to defeat that
presumption.
Norweathers suggests that counsel did not call the expert
as a witness because the technical evidence was beyond coun-
sel’s comprehension. But he admits that this is pure specula-
tion, and “[s]uch speculation does not persuade us that an ev-
identiary hearing is needed.” Santiago v. Streeval, 36 F.4th 700,
712 (7th Cir. 2022). His own uncertainty highlights the defi-
ciency of his ineffective assistance of counsel claim: he has
failed to allege a substantial, not just conceivable, likelihood
of a different result.
Even if the expert’s testimony would have enhanced Nor-
weathers’s credibility in certain areas (such as whether he
stored child pornography on his computer or merely passed
the images along), his “bizarre and preposterous” testimony
was “far more damaging to his defense than any failure to call
an expert to testify on his behalf.” United States v. Hatterman,
853 F.2d 555, 559 (7th Cir. 1988). Because Norweathers’s “own
explanation of the chain of events leading to his indictment is
fantastic,” we cannot conclude that he was materially preju-
diced by the decision not to present the expert witness. Id. Our
confidence in the outcome of the trial is in no way under-
mined by counsel’s performance, and the district court was

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No. 23-2406 15
well within its discretion to deny this claim without an evi-
dentiary hearing.
A FFIRMED

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