D.Md.: “[T]he age of the information supporting a warrant is increasingly irrelevant when the object searched is stored on a computer.”

14-month-old information in a child pornography case is not stale. More importantly, it seems that computer forensics makes staleness almost irrelevant: “the age of the information supporting a warrant is increasingly irrelevant when the object searched is stored on a computer.” United States v. Johnson, 865 F. Supp. 2d 702 (D. Md. 2012)

Additionally, the ability of forensic examiners to recover files from a computer—even those deleted by a user—impacts a court’s staleness analysis. Since evidence on a computer is recoverable months or years after it has been downloaded, deleted, or viewed; the age of the information supporting a warrant is increasingly irrelevant when the object searched is stored on a computer. See, e.g., Gourde, 440 F.3d at 1071 (“Having paid for multi-month access to a child pornography site, Gourde was also stuck with the near certainty that his computer would contain evidence of a crime had he received or downloaded images in violation of § 2252. Thanks to the long memory of computers, any evidence of a crime was almost certainly still on his computer, even if he had tried to delete the images. FBI computer experts, cited in the affidavit, stated that ‘even if … graphic image files [] have been deleted … these files can easily be restored.’ In other words, his computer would contain at least the digital footprint of the images.”); United States v. Toups, No. 2:06-cr-112-MEF, 2007 WL 433562, at *4 (M.D. Ala. February 6, 2007) (“Further bolstering the conclusion that the staleness calculation is unique when it comes to cases of Internet child pornography is the images and videos stored on a computer are not easily eliminated from a computer’s hard drive. The mere deletion of a particular file does not necessarily mean that the file cannot later be retrieved.”).

Note: The court also notes that no case it could find had ever found staleness in a CP case.