Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Criminal Law Blogs -> Tenth Circuit Blog

Criminal Law

: Tenth Circuit Blog

Circuit Snippets

By Shari Allison

The U.S. District Court in Middle District Pennsylvania concluded that the private-search doctrine did not authorize law enforcement officers to copy a computer's hard drive and scan all of its contents after a private person found evidence of possible crimes in a few files. In this case, the landlord put the defendant's possessions, including his computer, on the curb after defendant failed to pay his rent. Someone else took possession of (stole?) the computer, found what the person thought might be child porn, and in an excess of community zeal, deleted the files and told the police, who then searched all the files. The district court rejected the government's argument that the hard drive was a "single container" and held that the government's search exceeded the scope of the third party's search...continue to full post

Full post as published by Tenth Circuit Blog on November 20, 2008 (boomark / email).