Marsh v. Colorado
Annotate this CaseA jury convicted petitioner Anthony Marsh of sexually assaulting three of his granddaughters and possessing more than twenty images depicting child pornography. Marsh appealed, and the court of appeals affirmed his conviction. The Colorado Supreme Court granted certiorari to consider whether the presence of temporary internet cache files stored on a person’s hard drive could constitute evidence of “knowing possession” as used in Colorado’s child pornography statute, 18-6-403, C.R.S. (2016). The Court held: when a computer user seeks out and views child pornography on the internet, he possesses the images he views. Here, since the evidence presented at trial established that Marsh’s cache contained images that a computer user had previously viewed on the web browser, the Court concluded that the internet cache images qualified as relevant evidence that Marsh had previously viewed, and thus possessed, those images. Therefore, when considered as a whole and in the light most favorable to the State, the evidence was sufficient to support the jury’s conclusion that Marsh possessed more than twenty images depicting child pornography. In addition, the Court held that even if the trial court improperly admitted the forensic interviewers’ testimony as lay opinion, the error was harmless.
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