The Northern District of Iowa concludes that a search warrant for premises in a drug case can logically include computers and digital media as a thing to be searched under a warrant for the premises. United States v. Gocha, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63518 (N.D. Iowa August 28, 2007):
Upon review of the record and [Magistrate] Judge Zoss’s Report and Recommendation, the court concludes that Judge Zoss correctly concluded that there was a substantial basis to support the state magistrate’s finding of probable cause to search defendant Gocha’s personal computers. The court recognizes that the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has held that “punctilious paragraph-by-paragraph dissection of the supporting affidavit” is not the appropriate standard of review. United States v. Townsley, 843 F.2d 1070, 1076 (8th Cir. 1988); see United States v. Leisure, 844 F.3d 1347, 1354 (8th Cir. 1988) (declining to “undertake a piecemeal dismemberment of the various paragraphs of the affidavit without attention to its force as a whole.”). Rather, the court acknowledges that a determination of probable cause depends on a reading of the affidavit as a whole. Gates, 462 U.S. at 237. Here, Judge Zoss considered the affidavit as a whole. Viewing the affidavit in a common sense manner, the court cannot say that the issuing state magistrate did not have a substantial basis to believe that the items sought in the warrant would be found on defendant Gocha’s personal computers. “‘[I]n the case of drug dealers, evidence is likely to be found where the dealers live.'” United States v. Newton, 389 F.3d 631, 635 (6th Cir. 2004) (quoting United States v. Jones, 159 F.3d 969, 975 (6th Cir. 1998) (internal citations omitted)). This would logically extend to personal computers found where dealers live. The court, therefore, also overrules this objection.
Query: Is judicial deference to the issuing magistrate’s conclusions about the officer’s experience in what might be found and where becoming absolute? There have been several cases like this in the last few months, and computers are becoming a target of drug search warrants. I’ve regularly seen it in search warrants coming across my desk, too.
Plaintiff was arrested for credit card fraud after her car was connected to a scam as the getaway car. Police were getting a search warrant and they staked out her house, and they knocked to arrest her. The warrantless entry here was based on probable cause and exigent circumstances that evidence would be destroyed before the warrant could arrive. This was not considered police created exigency because a warrant was coming, and they were legitimately in fear of destruction of evidence since the plaintiff was aware that she was being followed by the police. (The criminal case was dismissed against her.) Clark v. Luker, 2007 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 63895 (W.D. Mich. August 29, 2007).*
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"If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. It isn't, and they don't." —Me
"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well." –Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw), Josh Billings on Ice, and Other Things (1868) (erroneously attributed to Robert Louis Stevenson, among others)
“I am still learning.” —Domenico Giuntalodi (but misattributed to Michelangelo Buonarroti (common phrase throughout 1500's)).
"Love work; hate mastery over others; and avoid intimacy with the government."
—Shemaya, in the Thalmud
"It is a pleasant world we live in, sir, a very pleasant world. There are bad people in it, Mr. Richard, but if there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers."
—Charles Dickens, “The Old Curiosity Shop ... With a Frontispiece. From a Painting by Geo. Cattermole, Etc.” 255 (1848)
"A system of law that not only makes certain conduct criminal, but also lays down rules for the conduct of the authorities, often becomes complex in its application to individual cases, and will from time to time produce imperfect results, especially if one's attention is confined to the particular case at bar. Some criminals do go free because of the necessity of keeping government and its servants in their place. That is one of the costs of having and enforcing a Bill of Rights. This country is built on the assumption that the cost is worth paying, and that in the long run we are all both freer and safer if the Constitution is strictly enforced." —Williams v. Nix, 700 F. 2d 1164, 1173 (8th Cir. 1983) (Richard Sheppard Arnold, J.), rev'd Nix v. Williams, 467 US. 431 (1984).
"The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence." —Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643, 659 (1961).
"Any costs the exclusionary rule are costs imposed directly by the Fourth Amendment."
—Yale Kamisar, 86 Mich.L.Rev. 1, 36 n. 151 (1987).
"There have been powerful hydraulic pressures throughout our history that bear heavily on the Court to water down constitutional guarantees and give the police the upper hand. That hydraulic pressure has probably never been greater than it is today." — Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 39 (1968) (Douglas, J., dissenting).
"The great end, for which men entered into society, was to secure their property." —Entick v. Carrington, 19 How.St.Tr. 1029, 1066, 95 Eng. Rep. 807 (C.P. 1765)
"It is a fair summary of history to say that the safeguards of liberty have frequently been forged in controversies involving not very nice people. And so, while we are concerned here with a shabby defrauder, we must deal with his case in the context of what are really the great themes expressed by the Fourth Amendment." —United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U.S. 56, 69 (1950) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting)
"The course of true law pertaining to searches and seizures, as enunciated here, has not–to put it mildly–run smooth." —Chapman v. United States, 365 U.S. 610, 618 (1961) (Frankfurter, J., concurring).
"A search is a search, even if it happens to disclose nothing but the bottom of a turntable." —Arizona v. Hicks, 480 U.S. 321, 325 (1987)
"For the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places. What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. ... But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected." —Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 351 (1967)
“Experience should teach us to be most on guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” —United States v. Olmstead, 277 U.S. 438, 479 (1925) (Brandeis, J., dissenting)
“Liberty—the freedom from unwarranted intrusion by government—is as easily lost through insistent nibbles by government officials who seek to do their jobs too well as by those whose purpose it is to oppress; the piranha can be as deadly as the shark.” —United States v. $124,570, 873 F.2d 1240, 1246 (9th Cir. 1989)
"You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometimes / You just might find / You get what you need." —Mick Jagger & Keith Richards, Let it Bleed (album, 1969)
"In Germany, they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Catholic. Then they came for me–and by that time there was nobody left to speak up."
—Martin Niemöller (1945) [he served seven years in a concentration camp]
“Children grow up thinking the adult world is ordered, rational, fit for purpose. It’s crap. Becoming a man is realising that it’s all rotten. Realising how to celebrate that rottenness, that’s freedom.” – John le Carré, The Night Manager (1993), line by Richard Roper
"The point of the Fourth Amendment, which often is not grasped by zealous officers, is not that it denies law enforcement the support of the usual inferences which reasonable men draw from evidence. Its protection consists in requiring that those inferences be drawn by a neutral and detached magistrate instead of being judged by the officer engaged in the often competitive enterprise of ferreting out crime." —Johnson v. United States, 333 U.S. 10, 13-14 (1948)
The book was dedicated in the first (1982) and sixth (2025) editions to Justin William Hall (1975-2025). He was three when this project started in 1978.
