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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.
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Friday January 30 2015, @01:02AM
A very large number of bankers should be jailed. However, the adverse effect of their actions has been relatively diffuse in the manner that spamming has a diffuse effect.
If I send 1 billion spam messages, 0.1% are received and each received message wastes 10 seconds then I collectively and foreseeably waste 10 millions seconds of people's time. That's more than 1 person year of office productivity. Therefore, the externalized cost is more than one year of salary. For this anti-social behavior, some people believe that we should hunt down and kill spammers. After receiving unrelenting spam and having to upgrade mail servers to handle spam (now at 4GB per hour per published address), I am sympathetic to this cause. However, this is minor compared to financial fraud.
Bernie Madoff embezzled US$155 million(?) which is more disposable income than 100 first-world professionals could expect to earn in a lifetime. Therefore, this crime is on the scale of dashing the hopes and aspirations of 100 people. It should be punished accordingly. However, even this is minor.
Mis-selling of insurance and mortgages worldwide and the foreseeable catastrophe which it has caused is more than three times the cost of establishing a permanent base on the Moon for the purpose of moving heavy industry out of our biosphere and exploring further into space.
If we missed our chance to colonize space then, collectively, we deserve our fate.
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