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Appeals Court Orders Government To Return Non-Child Porn Files To Convicted Man

posted by janrinok on Friday January 09 2015, @11:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the OK-here's-your-adult-porn.... dept.

AnonTechie writes:

A man convicted of child porn possession has been fighting to reclaim his personal emails and photos from the government, but so far has been rebuffed by its claims that separating the good and bad files would be too difficult to pursue. A lower court agreed with the government's assessment of the situation, but this has now been overturned by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

As the ruling [pdf link] notes, the lower court failed in its duty to shift the burden of proof from the convicted man to the government.

The panel held that the district court’s decision not to put the burden of proof on the government was legal error, where the defendant filed the Rule 41(g) motion after he pleaded guilty and the government no longer needed his property as evidence. The panel held that the government could not have carried its burden of proof had the district court correctly placed it on the government, where the government failed to submit any evidence of the difficulty and costs of segregating the defendant’s data, which it claimed was a legitimate reason for retention of the non-contraband files.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150103/12585929589/appeals-court-orders-government-to-return-non-child-porn-files-to-convicted-man.shtml

 
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  • (Score: 2) by nukkel on Saturday January 10 2015, @10:56PM

    by nukkel (168) on Saturday January 10 2015, @10:56PM (#133556)

    The DA made the mistake of only ordering the contraband files forfeit. Normal procedure is to order the storage devices, and all files on them (be they contraband or not), forfeit. This, together with the lower court placing the burden of proof on the defendant (a legal error, since he had already pleaded guilty at that point), led the appelate judges to decide to revert the lower court's decision.

    So this decision will be irrelevant for the majority of other cases out there.

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday January 11 2015, @12:23AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Sunday January 11 2015, @12:23AM (#133583) Homepage

    >Normal procedure is to order the storage devices, and all files on them (be they contraband or not), forfeit.

    Fuck law enforcement. Ten bucks says that the cop will just dump the files onto a storage NAS somewhere then just wipe the drives and bring them home or pawn them.

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