Warrantless seizure of child pornography evidence fatal to prosecution’s case

The Michigan Court of Appeals issued an opinion on November 6, 2014 affirming a lower court’s decision excluding evidence recovered from Maximilian Paul Gingrich’s (“Defendant”) laptop computer in a child pornography case.

Defendant took his laptop to Best Buy for maintenance. An employee noticed suspicious file names while working on the laptop, and notified police. Police arrived at the store and asked the employee to access the files to ascertain whether or not they were actually child pornography. An employee attached Defendant’s hard drive to a Best Buy computer and confirmed the presence of child pornography on the drive.

The failure to obtain a search warrant prior to accessing the files was ultimately fatal to the charges brought against Defendant. The warrantless search was held to violate his Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. Specifically, the court held “physically attaching another device to its hard drive” was a trespass amounting to an unlawful search under the Fourth Amendment and a similar provision of the Michigan Constitution.

None of the possible exceptions to the warrant requirement were present, so the evidence was suppressed under the exclusionary rule. The photographs recovered from Defendant’s laptop were the only evidence in the case, so it was dismissed.

There’s no nice way to say it:

The police killed this case the moment they accessed that hard drive without a warrant. Their rush to obtain evidence allowed a possessor of child pornography to avoid the legal consequences of his crime.

I know law enforcement is a difficult job, and it’s often easier to blog about something after the fact than to make the perfect decision in the field every single time. But hopefully this case resulted in a comprehensive seminar on Fourth Amendment compliance in evidence gathering for the police department involved.

And hopefully the Defendant will be caught again, and when he is, the evidence will be lawfully gathered and the jail sentence very, very long.