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posted by on Wednesday March 22 2017, @08:19AM   Printer-friendly
from the better-treatment-than-if-he's-guilty dept.

On Monday, a US federal appeals court sided against a former Philadelphia police officer who has been in jail 17 months because he invoked his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. He had refused to comply with a court order commanding him to unlock two hard drives the authorities say contain child porn.

The 3-0 decision (PDF) by the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals means that the suspect, Francis Rawls, likely will remain jailed indefinitely or until the order (PDF) finding him in contempt of court is lifted or overturned. However, he still can comply with the order and unlock two FileVault encrypted drives connected to his Apple Mac Pro. Using a warrant, authorities seized those drives from his residence in 2015. While Rawls could get out from under the contempt order by unlocking those drives, doing so might expose him to other legal troubles.

In deciding against Rawls, the court of appeals found that the constitutional rights against being compelled to testify against oneself were not being breached. That's because the appeals court, like the police, agreed that the presence of child porn on his drives was a "foregone conclusion." The Fifth Amendment, at its most basic level, protects suspects from being forced to disclose incriminating evidence. In this instance, however, the authorities said they already know there's child porn on the drives, so Rawls' constitutional rights aren't compromised.

[...] The suspect's attorney, Federal Public Defender Keith Donoghue, was disappointed by the ruling.

"The fact remains that the government has not brought charges," Donoghue said in a telephone interview. "Our client has now been in custody for almost 18 months based on his assertion of his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination."

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:43AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @09:43AM (#482628)

    All child pronography already exist in a qquantum state. Quantum computers will be used by connisuers of child porn to extract the nude child ground state from an arbitrary soize array of pixels. If the suspect filled his hard drive with ranodm data there already be cp on the drive. Since he refused to give up the passwords it is Shrdocinger's encrypted child porn.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:43PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 22 2017, @01:43PM (#482698)

    Fap fap fape.

  • (Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday March 23 2017, @05:10AM

    by tftp (806) on Thursday March 23 2017, @05:10AM (#483089) Homepage

    You don't have to go quantum on this. A simple XOR operation on any cyphertext will reveal any plaintext (of the same length) that you want - as long it's you who is providing the key. In essence, you can take the Bible and XOR it with a specially crafted stream that converts it into whatever nasty video you desire.

    The victim can claim that *his* key is truer, and it returns an entirely innocent set of Shakespeare's plays. But there is no way to prove one vs. the other, and the jury is likely to believe the nasty story.

  • (Score: 2) by marcello_dl on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:22PM

    by marcello_dl (2685) on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:22PM (#483247)

    > All child pronography already exist in a qquantum state.
    Your spelling, too.