The natural tendency of child pornography collectors to keep it justified, at least under the good faith exception, a search of a nearly new smartphone for old evidence of child porn. Here, defendant admitted, in a conversation police were listening to, that he sexually abused a young man in 2005. When he was arrested, officers seized his phone and applied for a search warrant for, not only the recent call log, but the photographs on it. Child porn was found, and the warrant was sustained because there was a \u201cfair probability\u201d it could be there as a trophy. “The six-year period here stretches the permissible temporal boundaries,” but it’s still valid. United States v. Mathis, 2013 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 31393 (M.D. Fla. February 19, 2013):<\/p>\n
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Mathis’s staleness argument is factually related to a premise of his Franks argument (the 2005 evidence could not be on the 2011 smartphone) and offered to support the applicability of Leon’s third exception (supra, making the warrant “so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely unreasonable”). The staleness concept is just a commonsensical metric for evaluating probable cause in a search warrant application …<\/p>\n
Mathis recognizes as much because he presented a forensic analyst (Adam Sharp) to give an opinion about the migration of data from one cell phone platform to another. That expert opined that it was not likely that 2004-2005 data from Mathis’s old phone would be found on the seized smartphone because of the differences between their operating systems. Nonetheless, the analyst conceded that text messages could be transferred to other media sources and that contacts can be transferred on a SIM card. The government, in contrast, did not present an expert; however, Vizcarrondo’s supervisor testified that Vizcarrondo had conferred with an analyst within their agency before presenting the application.<\/p>\n
The six-year period here stretches the permissible temporal boundaries. As for Jiles’s text messages, I find that it exceeded the acceptable limits, although this finding is meaningless for probable cause purposes. As for Mathis’s contact list or photos, I find a fair probability existed to believe that Mathis could have entered Jiles’s name and personal data and those of the Orlando participants manually into his smartphone’s contact list. Such information and any photos associated with his victims or associates can amount to trophies for sexual offenders prone to children. United States v. Kaechele, 466 F.Supp.2d 868, 883-84 (E.D. Mich. 2006).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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